WATERSHIP DOWN
Ah, what the hell

  Since I've been told more than twice that I should've reviewed this movie after all, I figured it was worth a shot.  All relax, my recent spate of non-horror reviews is fairly temporary, though probably an indication of a greater mix of genres in the near future.

The ugliest rabbit you've ever seen, a big fat nasty one with bad teeth and a lazy eye, picks up another by its neck and crushes it in its jaws, blood oozing everywhere, chunks of flesh falling out while helpless rabbits scramble for cover.  What the hell?  It sure LOOKED like a kids' movie, at least on video (though theatrical marketing made it look a lot more stark)...

Well, ya shoulda known better, 'cuz it's Watership Down, the wonderful animated film based upon Richard Adams' novel, one of my all-time favorites.  (I can't count the number of times people told me this book was depressing as I was reading it, and I still have no idea what they're talking about.)  If you thought the life of bunnies was all sex and tearing up your garden, these fellas ought to let you know just what it's like.  Sure, they talk in Brit-accented English, they exhibit problem-solving intelligence, and organize into remarkably human-like social structures.  But basic gist of what we're shown is the singular problem of rabbit life: pretty much pure meat, they spend most of their lives trying to avoid getting eaten.  At least, that's what I tell my guests when they ask me why Bun keeps running away from them.

Watership Down starts with a narrated explanation, animated in a fashion that looks like a cross between Central American art and cave paintings, of creationism as told from a rabbit-centric point of view.  We're shown how the sun-god Frith created all the animals of the land, and when El-ahrairah the rabbit and his people got too numerous, how they were made prey by giving just about every other animal in interest in killing them.  You name it, it thinks of rabbits as lunch - cats, dogs, owls, humans, snakes (well, not snakes, I don't think there are any snakes that big in England).  But, not to stack the deck too hard against poor El-ahrairah and his people, they are given the various gifts that rabbits use from day to day to evade such a fate.  "All the world will be your enemy, Prince With A Thousand Enemies, and when they catch you, they will kill you," Frith tells him.  "But first, they must catch you."

And thus things move on to the bulk of our story, animated more conventionally but with great backgrounds and well-done characters.  The clairvoyant (and possibly paranoid) Fiver (voiced by Richard Briers) sees the destruction of his warren, and tries to encourage everyone to leave before the carnage arrives. (as it turns out, he's right, as we pan up to a big sign proclaiming the coming of a massive housing development) Few believe him, and that small handful, under the guidance of wise, sensible Hazel (John Hurt), set off to build a warren of their own, encountering various triumphs, tragedies, and ultimately a rival warren led by the tyrannic General Woundwort (Harry Andrews).

I've always figured that Watership Down was a strong influence on Stephen King's The Stand = the vision of coming doom, the ragtag band of survivors setting up their own colony, the rival colony, the spy sent into the other colony...y'know, except with rabbits, and a better ending.  I've never heard King refer to it specifically, but...(Brian goes and checks his copy of Danse Macabre)...well, it's on his list of his favorite books, with a little asterisk next to it meaning it's near the top, but no specific reference to The Stand.

This isn't a humorless movie - most of the comic relief is courtesy of Kehaar the seagull, voiced by Zero Mostel in a fashion that took me about a half hour to actually start figuring out what he's saying.  But there are no wacky sidekicks, no comical villain's assistants, no songs (well, maybe one), none of the things that Disney and others have made most people think are virtually inseparable from an animated film, though hopefully this is changing.

And yet, it is by necessity that this is an animated film.  Aside from the difficulties of getting trained rabbits to do what filmmakers want (jeez, I can't even get mine to stop chewing electrical cords, and he gets shocked every time), how seriously could you really take a dramatic struggle from live-action rabbits?  Imagine a whole herd (flock? stampede?) of live-action rabbits with Babe-inspired moving mouths to show just when each one is talking.  Who are we kidding?  Even I wouldn't be able to take that very seriously; it'd just be a step removed from Hammy Hamster (if you have no idea what I'm talking about, never mind).  And how would an imposing villain possibly be made out of General Woundwort?  They'd have to find a big, scarred, ugly bunny with all the mean of a pit bull with its balls in a clamp.  Yeah, right.  As soon as he came on-screen, you just know somebody in the audience would squeal "Ooh, he's so CUTE!!!"

The rabbits here aren't Thumper-styled cute rabbits; they're animated with the right attention to realistic proportions to make them plausible and the right touches of the fantastic to make them individuals. The notion of the rabbit society as a patriarchy - which I've never heard complaints of, but I'm sure they're out there - is slyly sidestepped by making the characters sexually ambiguous, really, except for the fact that they need does (read: female rabbits) for breeding.  The voice actors are all excellent, particularly Hurt as the moral and logical center of the survivors (note also, eventually, Joss "that South African guy in Lethal Weapon 2" Ackland as the rabbit equivalent of the Grim Reaper).  The music is a little too much sometimes, but does the job, and the story moves well and intelligently.

The are ultimately only three problems I have with this movie.  For one thing, every time there's blood, it's orange.  I don't mean the kind of reddish-orange we see in Halloween: H20, I mean it's really orange.  And there's an Art Garfunkel song, which is sure to send you reaching for the MUTE button, or perhaps a handgun.  And finally, the character of Bigwig (Michael Graham Cox), who is the favorite of everybody I know who read the novel, is given a bit of a short shrift here; he's not whittled away into oblivion or anything, but there's little of the fierce charm he displays in the novel.

Still, this movie won me over like very few animated films ever have.  The looks into the culture, society, theology and philosophy of this fictitious band of rabbits is well translated from the book, and as fascinating a look at a fictional "people" as any I've ever seen.  It's not a kid's movie, but kids who can handle a couple of really brutal moments (which are not at all made to look cool, glamorous or fun) should be ready for it, though I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea what worthwhile things kids would actually want to watch in a Pokemon world.  Open-minded adults are more likely to enjoy it.

At any rate, it does justice to the book, which is more praise than I can write in one night.  It even keeps that part where Bigwig tells Woundwort to eat shit and die.  Although he still says it in the language of the rabbits.

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