Some works of art never age. Some have a timeless quality that transcends generations simply because of the way they are made. How many modern CGI-constructed films have the striking intensity of something like Murakami's When the Wind Blows? How many would dare do to a human body what Masaki's Barefoot Gen did? The hand-drawn animation of the original adaptation of Richard Adam's treasured novel belongs in this category. When the blood of Fiver's vision seeps through the watercolour backgrounds; the swirling, hallucinatory nightmare of Holly's trauma; the Black Rabbit of Inlé slipping through the morning fog to Art Garfunkel...these images are indelible, forever etched into the audience's mind. BBC's Watership Down is aged from the moment it was released on Netflix, with scarcely an idea of what audience and age group it should be aimed at. The edge has been neutered. These aren't fluffy little bunnies, despite what the book covers might convey.
BBC has applied a coat of polish, rendering the story digitally and adding an all-star British voice cast. But to what end? The quality of the animation is a relic of a decade and a half ago, and far from achieving that ever-unattainable degree of 'realism', their movements lack weight. The rabbits bound over the fields without so much as a squelch in the mud or an unkempt hair. When they fight, I'm reminded of toddlers parrying or kittens poking at balls of wool, rather than blows aimed to kill or draw blood. Much of the series takes place inside warrens or in stormy night, but far from drumming up tension, this renders the frame into a murky swathe. The individual personalities of the rabbits can't shine through when you can barely make out who is who. Bigwig may have his trademark tuft of hair, but the rest of the colour palette ranges from brown to light grey, to a slightly darker shade of grey for the baddies.
The four hour runtime is more than double of the animated film (although less of the expanded television series of the 90s), yet the whole thing feels curiously empty. The strength of the original story is in Hazel's resolve, as an ordinary rabbit with the curse of leadership thrust upon him. He is not strong, or fast, or particularly clever, nor can he fly or tap into premonitions of the future, but he is wise enough to recognise these qualities in other rabbits of his warren. But here he has little credibility or agency. It doesn't help that one of his most ardent converts has been morphed into a bad-tempered bully (an apt performance from Boyega, but sadly given little range to work with). Would the Bigwig of the book ever threaten to kill his Chief Rabbit, after all that he has seen them through? It dulls the moment when he utters that iconic line - we all know it - and turns the tide against Woundwort, who has only ever recognised physical prowess as a worthy sign of a leader.
Yes, Watership Down is just a story about rabbits, but they are so much more than rabbits. As witnessed in the opening, they possess their own culture, language and social structures, weaving tales of the world around them. They have crafted a mythos surrounding what they treasure: their swiftness, trickery and cunning, as a way of running from the thousand and one dangers that hunt them (the final freeze frame of Woundwort being one of the few improvements, fully acknowledging the nature of their legends). The story is a successful exercise in self-seriousness, in spite of this entire world being maybe a few hectares of grass and weeds, in some village in the south of England. Without this background knowledge and interior insight, though, it's just a bunch of anthropomorphised animals running around a plot point. Adams was careful to not to make them too human, not allowing them to fall in love or suffer from bouts of overt sentimentality. They run and dig because there is simply no alternative to survival.
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