Watership Down (1978). Written and directed by Martin Rosen, based on the novel by Richard Adams. Starring John Hurt, Richard Briers, and Michael Graham Cox.
If I had a nickel for every time I wrote about how a father’s whimsical story for his children evolved into a hauntingly mature parable about humanity in animated form, I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but…
Well, okay, it’s not really that strange. A lot of children’s books begin their lives as stories parents tell to their kids, even when those books deal with rather serious topics. I should preface this with the disclaimer that while I have read Watership Down, I was so young and it was so long ago that I don’t remember it well. The details have been lost in the miasma of books I read as an earnestly nerdy child who never wanted to admit when she didn’t understand things that were beyond her current level of comprehension.
Richard Adams’ Watership Down has a very sweet and wholesome origin story. Back in the early 1970s, Adams was a mild-mannered civil servant living in London with his wife and two daughters. One day they piled into the family car for a road trip; they were, according to Adams, headed to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Judi Dench in Twelfth Night. Adams’ daughters asked for a story to keep them entertained on the drive. Without any preparation, he began telling them a story about a pair of rabbits having adventures.
Adam also credits his daughters for encouraging him to write the story down later, as well as demanding a happier ending than the one he originally planned. In fact, right up until his death in 2016 at the age of 96, Adams was consistently maintaining that his daughters contributed a great deal to Watership Down, which is very charming in a very dad kind of way.
While Adams was writing, he consulted Ronald Lockley’s 1964 book The Private Life of the Rabbit for some information about rabbits. Lockley was a Welsh naturalist and conservationist who spent most of his life studying and advocating for seabirds that migrated through or made their homes on various islands, but in the 1950s he spent about four years studying rabbits for the British Nature Conservancy. After that, he went back to mostly writing about birds, but Lockley and Adams became friends, and Lockley appears as a character in Adams’ 1977 book Plague Dogs. (Plague Dogs was also adapted into an animated movie by Martin Rosen; we might watch it in the future.)
It’s part of the lore of Watership Down that it was rejected by many publishers before finding a home, but nobody can agree on exactly what that means. It looks like it may have been rejected by a mere handful of publishers and agents, which barely even counts as rejection. But it is true that those rejections came from people who didn’t know quite what to make of it. They felt that it didn’t fit easily into either adult literature or children’s literature, a problem that publishers have only gotten worse at handling in the past fifty-some years.
Adams did find somebody willing to take on Watership Down. That was Rex Collings, who ran an eponymous one-man publishing house that mostly offered books about Africa and was responsible for bringing the works of several African writers to the United Kingdom. But he liked Watership Down and wanted to publish it, even knowing it was a gamble. In an obituary following his death in 1996, an acquaintance of Collings recalled that after accepting the book he wrote to her, “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?”
Maybe he was a little mad. Collings couldn’t afford to pay Adams an advance and the book’s initial print run was 2500 copies. But it was a madness that paid off, because Watership Down quickly became a runaway success with both readers and critics, and it went on to sell more than 50 million copies worldwide.
Film producer Martin Rosen optioned the book just a few years after it was published. Originally he hired animator John Hubley to direct it, but he fired Hubley after a few months due to creative differences—and they were genuine creative differences, not euphemistic film industry “creative differences.” According to Richard Bell, one of the artists who briefly worked on the film with Hubley, Rosen wanted more grit and naturalism, whereas Hubley wanted a more playful and experimental style. Obviously Rosen won out, taking over as director after Hubley left, but a bit of Hubley’s work remains in the film, in the form of the extended prologue sequence that tells the rabbits’ mythological origin story. (Much more recently, Rosen has landed himself in hot water with the UK courts and the Adams estate in a dispute over the rights to Watership Down.)
The naturalism in Watership Down is one of the film’s most distinctive aspects. It certainly wasn’t what was in style in animated films of the time; this was the era where animal films generally looked like Disney’s The Rescuers or The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (both from 1977). Audiences were plenty used to seeing an animated rabbit on their movie and television screens, but that rabbit was Bugs Bunny. Rabbits that talked and schemed and had terrifying quasi-spiritual psychic visions of dark fates but still looked and moved like ordinary rural rabbits were not what people expected from their animal cartoons.
A lot of that distinctive visual style of Watership Down comes from the work of lead animator Arthur Humberstone. Humberstone had gotten his start at Gaumont-British Animation, the British animation studio founded by former Disney director David Hand (of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves [1937] and Bambi [1942] fame). The studio was part of industrialist J. Arthur Rank’s plan to build a British film industry that would rival Hollywood. Which, uh, didn’t quite work out the way he wanted, but some of Rank’s efforts were more successful than others. One of the more successful ventures was the establishment of Pinewood Studios, which has been used to make many of the world’s biggest films since 1936, including Superman (1978), Alien (1979), most of the James Bond franchise, and Batman (1989).
Alas, the animation venture was not among the successes; Gaumont-British Animation lasted only a few years before shuttering. Some of what they produced during their brief existence was Hand’s Animaland (1948), a series of humorous shorts about animals frolicking in a magical woodland. Watch just a few seconds and Hand’s Disney style is immediately recognizable.
This was where Arthur Humberstone was learning the work of animation, but it wasn’t the only animation studio in the UK at the time. Back in the late ’30s, the husband-and-wife team of filmmakers John Halas and Joy Batchelor had started making animations, mostly for advertisements. Halas, who had been born in Budapest as János Halász, had learned animation under George Pal, who was the creator of Puppetoons, as well as the producer behind a number of Hollywood sci fi films, including The War of the Worlds (1953) and The Time Machine (1960). In 1940, Halas and Batchelor founded a film studio (which was called—surprise!—Halas and Batchelor) and spent the war years making propaganda films with morale-boosting and anti-fascist themes. They also made Britain’s first feature-length animated film: the 1945 film Handling Ships, a 70-minute stop-motion instructional video for the Royal Navy.
A few years later, Halas and Batchelor went on to make Britain’s other first feature-length animation, the one that got released in theaters and wasn’t a navy video: the 1954 adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. One of the animators on the film was Humberstone, who was given the task of animating the characters of Boxer and Benjamin after expressing an interest in horses. Humberstone would work on different projects over the next several years, both with Halas and Batchelor and elsewhere, including Yellow Submarine (1968), The Osmonds (1972), and the early ’70s cartoon series The Jackson 5ive.
(Aside: In spite of being fully cognizant of my looming deadline for this column, at this point I was thoroughly distracted by reading about the surprisingly broad variety of musical groups who had animated series associated with them. That’s how I was reminded of the early ’90s fever dream that was Hammerman. Now you’ve been reminded of it too. I’m sorry/You’re welcome.)
Back to the rabbits! It was Humberstone’s experience with animated critters that got him the job as the lead animator on Watership Down, and brought him back later to work on Plague Dogs. For Watership Down, Humberstone actually kept rabbits in his garden to sketch and film; he would show the frame-by-frame movements to the animation artists as references. He also filmed his own dog to get the movements of the film’s dogs right, such as in the scenes with the dog sniffing out the rabbits along the riverbank.
The commitment to naturalism in the film extended to the setting. Watership Down is a real place; it’s a hill located near the village of Ecchinswell in Hampshire in South East England, and the novel was named after the hill. (According to Adams, it was his publisher Rex Collings who came up with the title after seeing the landscape that inspired Adams.) If you look at photographs of the hill—or visit it, I guess, should you be in the neighborhood—it’s immediately recognizable as the hill, the one from Fiver’s vision, the high, wind-swept place where the rabbits eventually make their home. The film embraces the Hampshire setting wholeheartedly, not just in the hill itself but in the churchyard, the farm buildings, and fields.
The result is, of course, beautiful. It’s a truly gorgeous film, particularly in those scenes that embrace the painterly, watercolor style of traditional landscapes. It’s a film stylized to feel like stepping into a series of pastoral paintings.
Which makes it all the more interesting, I think, that the story is so freaking weird.
Oh, I know it’s weird in the book too. I’m not denying that. I just want to take a moment to emphasize just how weird it is, because I think it’s easy to forget because it’s been such an ingrained part of Western pop culture for so long.
People have spent decades interpreting Watership Down in countless different ways: as a religious allegory, a Homeric quest, a work of socio-political commentary, a version of Joseph Campbell’s heroic monomyth, and so on. Adams, for his part, always dismissed such high-minded readings of his book. In a 2007 BBC interview he said, “It’s only a made-up story, it’s in no sense an allegory or parable or any kind of political myth. I simply wrote down a story I told to my little girls.”
That doesn’t necessarily mean various analyses are wrong. It could just mean that Adams had no interest in telling the world how to interpret his book about rabbits having an adventure. Adams took bits of pieces of everything from classic myths to his own wartime experiences to Lockley’s observations about rabbits, and he mixed them all together to create his story.
That’s why it’s fun—for a particular definition of fun that I get to choose—to look at Watership Down as a work of speculative fiction. As I was rewatching the movie for the first time in many, many years, I kept thinking about how different elements of the story recall different themes and ideas that speculative fiction loves to explore.
It begins right off the bat with the rabbits’ origin myth, which I absolutely love because it comes from asking: What would an origin story look like for a skittish yet ubiquitous prey animal? It looks like the story of El-Ahrairah, “The Prince With a Thousand Enemies,” which highlights the constant danger rabbits live in while also providing for the sort of enduring morality that cultures love to weave into their lore.
And it continues through the rest of the story. What sort of society might we imagine to combine the natural reality of being a rabbit (everybody wants to eat them) with the human requirements of telling a story (they have to think and act in ways human readers can understand)? What happens when that society is subjected to cataclysmic change? When the individuals at the top of a militaristic hierarchy refuse to react to that change? What different types of society might evolve from same natural pressures?
We see examples throughout the film: the original warren that Fiver and the others leave before it’s destroyed, the precarious survival Cowslip and his warren manage by cooperating with a human farmer, the sheltered naivete of the captive farm rabbits, the cult-like authoritarianism of Efrafa under the control of Woundwort. Kehaar the seagull even provides an outsider perspective on the way rabbits organize their communities. (Quick aside: Kehaar is voiced by American actor Zero Mostel, who played Tevye in the original Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof, and starred opposite Gene Wilder in Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers.)
Having these kinds of questions about individuals, communities, and societies woven into the story is why Watership Down feels like such a thoroughly speculative story to me. We can take any one of those threads and place it easily in, say, an episode of Star Trek or a sci fi novel. A social structure that looks familiar but is still a bit alien to us, the desperate seer trying to warn of imminent destruction, the hopeful adventurers coming upon a sinister trap, the clash against a cruel and rigid community—these are all premises that we love to explore in countless iterations, because every new story is a way of digging a little deeper into what makes people tick.
I think that’s one of the reasons Watership Down has remained so enduringly popular over the years. Sure, it also has something to do with how it traumatized a generation of children with so much bunny death, but it’s more than that. I think we’re also captivated by a story that explores these speculative ideas by using the pastoral mundanity of the most ordinary of animals. It’s a disarming approach, one that allows for some depth that we might not expect from a story with the plot “some rabbits look for a place to live.” It’s also an example of how the apparent simplicity or familiarity of a story is not necessarily indicative of what we find when we dig down a little beneath the surface.
How many of us have Watership Down memories from childhood? Have your thoughts about the story changed over the years? I’d love to hear from anybody who has read the book recently or knows it well!
For those keeping count at home, this is the third John Hurt film we’ve covered in this column, but it won’t be the last.
We’re Working Through Some Stuff
People like to say science fiction is about ideas, but sometimes it’s all about feelings. Big, messy, human feelings like love, loneliness, fear, and grief. In June we’re watching a selection of films from around the world all about what happens when human emotions get science fictional.
June 4 — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Michel Gondry
The sci fi breakup film against which all other sci fi breakup films are measured.
Watch: HBO, Amazon, Apple, and more.
View the trailer
June 11 — The Long Walk (2019), directed by Mattie Do
Grief and guilt in a time travel ghost story set in the Laotian countryside. Not to be confused with the upcoming film based on the Stephen King novel. That’s a different long walk.
Watch: Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.
View the trailer
June 18 — The Quiet Earth (1985), directed by Geoff Murphy
Isolation and connection after the end of the world in New Zealand.
Watch: Hoopla, Kanopy, Amazon, Roku, and more.
View the trailer
June 25 — 2046 (2004), directed by Wong Kar-wai
The layered, non-linear, genre-bending final film in the informal trilogy that began with Days of Being Wild (1990) and In the Mood for Love (2000).
Watch: Amazon, Fandango, Microsoft.
View the trailer
I read this book (the first time, reread it many times after), I guess, in 5th or 6th grade. I know I had read it before the movie came out, so I knew what to expect. And I loved the movie. It stays pretty close to the book.
If you have not read the book since childhood, I would suggest that a re-read would be very rewarding. Just an incredible book.
TBH I only saw the film once, and like a previous poster, after I had read the book, so I also knew what to expect – perhaps I’ll give it a re-watch….
Seconding that. It’s an amazingly deep, provocative, beautiful, and (yes) weird book that’s aged well and deserves its status as a classic.
I read it a year after it came out, wrote a paper on it for college English class, acquired an American first edition later (don’t even ask what the British original is worth today), and read it to my children later.
One thing I admired was the amount of English nature woven into the book. The turning of the seasons is echoed in the first and last sentences. Also, the way Hazel’s passing is described at the end is still one of the most poignant deaths I’ve ever read in literature.
I remember reading the book when I was in my early to mid-teens; I thought it was fairly recent at the time, but I realize now that I was only four when it came out. I remember it being a very thick book. I probably borrowed my big sister’s copy. I think I was rather fascinated by it at the time, but I have little memory of it now. I think I saw the movie, but I have even less memory of that.
Of course, I can’t help thinking that Watership Down sounds like an alternate title for Titanic or The Poseidon Adventure. I have to wonder, if Watership Down is a real place, why did they name it that? I know a down is a type of hill, but why would anyone have called something a “watership” back before there was such a thing as an airship or a spaceship, and all ships were waterships by default? (Except “ships of the desert,” but those are camels.) Ehh, it’s probably a corruption of some earlier name, maybe something Roman.
I have to dig through my bookmarks, because I did actually come across an explanation of of the landscape name in my research…
Here it is: https://literature.stackexchange.com/questions/957/why-is-it-called-watership-down
English is a weird language.
As for why the book has that title, it was actually his publisher’s idea, after Adams went through a process of brainstorming a bunch of other ideas. He originally called it “Hazel and Fiver,” then sent a list of other ideas to Collings, and Collings eventually suggested Watership Down based on the landscape and, presumably, it just kinda sounded cool.
Aha. I was thinking of extending my joke to muse about it being “-ship” as in “friendship,” that a body of water might have the property of watership, but I felt that was going too far down the, err, rabbit hole. But it turns out it wasn’t a joke after all, that I inadvertently stumbled on the right answer. A body of water is a watership in the same way that a certain municipality is a township.
As it happens, the reason I had no trouble understanding “Down” as a place name is that here in Cincinnati we have a racetrack called River Downs (or used to until it was renamed Belterra Park in 2013, I learned just now), which I now realize is a very similar kind of place name to Watership Down.
I read the book as a sprog. I also saw the movie in the cinema at around the same time (my mad uncle strikes again) and I was stunned given that my prior animation exposure was almost exclusively kids’ fare. There’s a whole generation of kids who were taken to see Watership Down and left the cinema with something akin to trauma thanks to the terrible events and the death of Hazel.
Emotionally the movie has few peers, perhaps only Graveyard Of The Fireflies. IMO the reason for the longevity of the movie is the commitment to the story. The characters manifest as real in spite of the fact that they are rabbits and the medium is animation. The tale of Hazel and Fiver is one to which you can relate even as a child. And General Woundwort likely featured in many kids’ nightmares and probably still does.
Adams deserves props simply for slipping a piece of (untranslated) Lapine under the radar:
“Silflay hraka, u embleer rah!”
The amazing thing Adams accomplishes with that line is that, by that point in the story, he’s fed us enough Lapine in bits and pieces so that we’re able to understand Bigwig’s line perfectly.
When I re-read the book as an adult, I was struck by this very fact.
Interesting article! I read Watership Down as a teen and enjoyed reading it, tho’ think I only read it once. I also saw the film and don’t remember being traumatized, oddly enough. A few decades later (I think I was in my thirties) I tried rereading it, found it horrifying as in “If I finish this, I’ll be traumatized,” and didn’t finish it. I’ve always been easily grossed out (as in “Please don’t talk about surgeries or other gross stuff at mealtimes”) so I don’t know why I reacted the way I did when I was a teen.
I will never understand why people think Watership Down is a children’s book. Or that the movie was a children’s movie. Way it the rabbits? The animation? Who read that and thought “great, just the thing for 12 year olds to read!”?
Tolkien’s children’s novel, The Hobbit, has a passage where the Dwarves ask Beorn to show them the two prisoners who confirmed their stories of escaping from Orcs. He shows them the head of one and the skin of the other.
For that matter, when I was 11 I was very proud of buying my first book for grown-ups. The Cruel Sea. Full of people being scalded to death, burned alive and, in one particularly memorable moment, incidentally massacred by their own side as a foreseen side effect of an attack on an enemy submarine. I loved it.
I have a hard time thinking of the book/film as weird—to me it’s a splendid adventure in 3 parts (the journey, Efrafa, and the battle for the homeland), and if the characters were humans in some quasi-proto-historic tribal setting it would still have worked. Unique but not at all weird.
I think you’ve back-doored into what makes it “weird” in the most delightful sense of the word: if it actually was a book about humans in a prehistoric setting, it would be a much more ordinary book. The fact that it’s rabbits, and not just rabbits but rabbits who are simultaneously anthropomorphized and not anthropomorphized at all is part of the book’s wonder (and that Adams pulls off that magic trick).
“Whimsy” seems like a frivolous word for what Adams pulls off: a book about rabbits on a quest (one of whom is a psychic, and another a book about rabbits on a quest (one of whom is a psychic, and another somehow being one of the coolest fighters in modern fantasy lit despite being a small herbivorous prey animal) ought to be whimsical, anyway. Yet Watership Down isn’t silly at all, despite being an epic on a small scale, despite having an invented language, despite… well, rabbits, animals whose very name is a synonym for being trivial or skittish.
None of it should work at all, is what I’m trying to say. It should be a silly, forgotten book and not a slightly astonishing modern classic that feels more profound every time one gives it a reread (and rereads can be hard, not because it’s a poor book, but because it’s a great one, and its horrors and tragedies and joys don’t lose their impact with age–if anything, they become richer in the context of one’s own experience, a mark of great lit).
And that’s weird.
“another somehow being one of the coolest fighters in modern fantasy lit despite being a small herbivorous prey animal”
One should not underestimate how dangerous rabbits can be. Just ask Elmer Fudd, Monty Python, and President Jimmy Carter.
As a child I was more traumatized by an animated Ralph Bakshi film called Wizards. It was promoted where I lived as an animated movie which my parents interpreted as a movie suitable for children. It is not.
The *other* SF movie from 1977 with Mark Hamill.
Hm, I didn’t know Hamill was doing voice acting right at the start of his career. I thought that was a field he got into in the ’90s as an escape from post-Star Wars typecasting hell.
I don’t recall when I first read Watership Down (yes, “first”) but I was at least a teenager. I had been rereading The Lord of the Rings since I was about 11, and loved any book about animals, so it was logical that an epic about rabbits would eventually find its way to my bookshelves. The violence in the book is much more nuanced than the animated movie, and there are surprisingly fewer deaths in the written version. One of the reasons I disliked the “movie” is that they not only added characters in order to kill them off, but killed off rabbits in gruesome display, and those who survived in the story.
For those interested in further reading I will recommend the graphic novel version, but not the follow up book “Tales…”, which strayed from much of what made Watership Down such a delight.
Should definitely do Plague Dogs – also a great film. Utterly dismal. Plus it has Alan Price on the soundtrack.
I loved this book as soon as I “discovered” it, sitting in my school library. Around the same time, the movie was on cable fairly often. I watched it over and over again, so much so that “Bright Eyes” instantly plays in my head when someone mentions the either the book or the film. I think I was around 9-10 yo at the time?
I’ve read the book many times since then and I feel like I get even more out of it as an adult. The worldbuilding is very good and I love the rabbit mythology throughout. I have a hardcover edition sitting right over there (*points to nearby bookshelf*). Perhaps it’s time for another reread soon…
Thank you for this!
I was, inevitably, traumatised by the film as a child. And I thought I was very brave when I found the book in the school library, aged 10, and read it.
I LOVED it.
It is probably my favourite book, Certainly the one I read most often.
I visited the Down because of this book – it is indeed very steep!
I think the 1978 film captures the characters pretty well.
Bigwig will probably always be my favourite character. The chapter with the wire is still harrowing (even after so many re-reads), and his Efrafa chapters are still genuinely tense. As well as the awesome Lapine line quoted above, he also has one of my favourite lines in all literature: “My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run, and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here.” So. Many. Emotions. Such a powerful, affecting, fist-pumping line!
As I’ve got older (it’s been over thirty years since I first picked up that library copy), I have grown to appreciate Hazel more, and adore him and his leadership. Reading Watership Down as a study in leadership is a great experience. Hazel is not the fastest, the most eloquent, the strongest, the cleverest, and he never gets into a fight. Hazel is a leader. Hazel values every one of his bunnies, and brings out the best in them. They work best as a team because of him. He is wonderful – and I love that he is based on Richard Adams’ old captain.
I would be up for a re-read (my umpteenth!) :-)
Huh, I never knew that, and it does add another note of loving richness to the book/story. Thank you for sharing that rather heartwarming factoid.
I first read the book at around the age of 10 or so as I recall, and I’ve re-read it a couple of times since. It’s an amazing piece of literature. As for the movie, I’ve only ever seen bits and pieces of it, and much like Plague Dogs, I don’t think I’ll inflict that on myself. I’ve already got more than a sufficiency of Trauma as it is, thanks.
The animated film is a cultural masterpiece – but parts of it a re very disturbing. It’s definitely not Disney!
Hazel is based on Major John Gifford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watership_Down#:~:text=In%20his%20autobiography%2C%20The%20Day,commanding%20officer%2C%20Major%20John%20Gifford.
I would have liked to have met the inspiration for Bigwig, Captain Desmond Kavanagh.
And Kehaar is based on a fighter from the Norwegian Resistance.
:-)
I first caught part of the movie on TV, when I was much younger – I arrived in the middle, so did not catch everything that was going. (I have rewatched it since, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it from beginning to end.)
The book, on the other hand, which I first read when I was older, I have read and re-read multiple times. I was quite surprised when I discovered that it had been published in 1972 – I had thought that it was much older; something about the language used, and the narrator’s voice, reminded me more of books I had. read from the 1930s and 1940s. I also remember being struck by the fact that it was set in a real place (complete with a map of the area around the real Watership Down included in the book), and by the worldbuilding, especially the mythology, with its tales of El-ahrairah.