That’s right, my beautiful watchers. It's time to revisit some childhood trauma.
Watership Down, published November 1972 was in the debut novel of English author Richard Adams.
Rather charmingly, this novel about the trials and tribulations of some rather put
upon sapient rabbits began life as an improved story Adams told to entertain his daughters
during a long car journey between London and Stratford-upon-Avon in 1966.
He was then encouraged by his children to refine and commit it to paper.
Here's a quick summary of the plot in case you’re not familiar with it.
Oh did I not mention it goes in really hard on blood and suffering? I kind of
assumed even if you hadn’t read this book or seen the film that came of it
you probably knew of its disturbing content by reputation.
It's the story of a small group of rabbits who flee their homeland based on the warning of a
possibly magical bunny, travel a long way to find a new one
and end up going to war with a nearby totalitarian regime.
These rabbits fight each other bloody, they vomit blood as they choke to death in snares,
they enact horrible disfiguring punishments on each other and there’s even a rather graphic
description of the genocide of an entire rabbit settlement at the hands of human exterminators.
According to Adams he never INTENDED to upset the children exposed to his work he simply didn’t want
to pull any punches regarding the hardships animals face in the wild and at the hands of
humans, therefore holding true to his strong beliefs in environmentalism and animal rights.
These rabbits have a surprisingly rich oral culture in the form of tales of a legendary,
seemingly demigod rabbit with a name that I’m definitely going
to have trouble saying out loud... El-ahrairah?
Multiple chapters spaced out evenly throughout the book
are given over to people describing his exploits.
This turned out to be a highlight of the book for me. The way the stories are constructed are
strongly reminiscent of the myths and legends from all over the real world, in particular,
the old fables about Robin Hood but also of Greek legends like the Aeneid and the Odyssey.
Adams also created a kind of mini-language for his rabbits,
inventing words for things that animals do that humans wouldn’t have an equivalent for,
like Silflay, which is the act of going above ground specifically to feed or Tharn,
which means becoming paralysed with fear when you look into bright lights.
There’s also the vice versa, as they have words for some human things rabbits lack understanding
of, though probably for the sake of the reader he doesn't always stick to those, allowing the
rabbits to talk about a Hrududu then calling it a car in the narration immediately afterwards.
Random aside but I’m a little embarrassed by how many times
the rabbits talked about the smelly burning white sticks that the humans
carried around before I realised they were talking about cigarettes.
Anyways, like many future best selling authors who came before and after him,
Adams spent the next few years being utterly
rejected by every publisher who so much as glanced at his manuscript.
To be fair in this case I can kind of see why they were hesitant. Not a lot of people
saw potential appeal for adults in a story about rabbit friends and the sheer amount of
blood and suffering involved was considered to be questionable content for children.
When it was finally picked up by a small-time publisher, it immediately sold enough copies
to be picked up by a big-time publisher and went on to sell over a million books worldwide,
winning Adam’s the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
The book received some criticism for poor female representation and
yeah that's a fair cop, there are zero lady rabbits in this with any
agency whatsoever. They’re objects to be treated badly by the villains and well by the heroes.
Adams’ appears to have acknowledged this and attempted to correct it in the sequel book,
a compendium of short stories set in the same world, several of which star female protagonists.
Many many political and religious allegories have
been assigned to the different characters and rabbit factions over the years, but
Adams himself has consistently denied any such intent in his writing. From the day it was
published to the day he died Adams swore blind that he simply made up a story about rabbits.
The film, released on the 6th of July, 1994 and was largely the passion project of the producer
Martin Rosen, who wrote the screenplay himself AND took over as director after John Hubley left the
project due to a dispute between them. He and Adams would go on to become lifelong friends.
The voice cast consisted of a surprising amount of classic British actors including Richard Briers,
Harry Andrews, Zero Mostel and John Hurt as Hazel, the lead rabbit, giving fans of Ralph
Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings a weird feeling as they heard Aragorn’s voice coming out of a bunny.
Move away? The whole warren?
You’ll never get there.
They won’t come, they’ll think you're outta your mind.
The Black Riders are watching the road night and day.
Unsurprisingly it faced the exact same demographic and marketing issues as the novel because,
spoiler warning, they largely stayed true to the violence and bloodshed of the book.
Wait are they really going to show..OH. My. Goodness! Sweet..merciful-WHAT
IS HAPPENING? You don’t have to show me this you don’t have to-AAHH. Ya did. Y-ya did.
Despite this, the film proved to be a box office and financial success with
extreme popularity in the UK making up for a lukewarm reception in the states.
It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation
and Total Film magazine named it the 47th-greatest British film of all time.
It's generally considered to be a well-crafted film with good voice acting and soundtrack and
extremely effective use of stylised animation, though its reputation for violence and
disturbing imagery tends to overshadow all of these things in the public consciousness.
Personally, I agree with this consensus, though with the slight addendum that I could have done
without the section in the middle where the pacing is utterly stopped dead in its tracks
for a three-minute-long Bright Eyes music video but maybe that’s just me. Let’s talk adaptation.
Ok so this film sticks CRAZY close to the plot of the book. Like,
I might have to invent a designation to be the opposite of In Name Only…
Umm… Very deserving of the name? Same guy different hat? Err… Clone..
Thing? Leave your inevitably much better ideas in the comments please.
Here’s a sexy synopsis of all the things that happened in both versions of the story.
Hazel and his diminutive little brother Fiver live in the reasonably sized Sandleford warren,
not a bad gaff though they’re kind of sick of the Owsla,
the local rabbit militia, getting dibs on all the best food.
Fiver receives a horrific vision foretelling doom for the entire
burrow. Hazel agrees to bring the warning to the head honcho bunny and
advise him that they all have to cheese it, but he doesn't take it seriously.
He also takes out his annoyance at the waste of time on Bigwig,
the guard who let them in to see him, prompting Bigwig to quit his job.
The three of them and a handful of others decide to evacuate anyway,
fighting past Owsla Captain Holly when he tries to stop them.
Their first hurdle in their journey is a combination of a river and a fast-approaching dog,
which they manage to overcome with the use of a raft to transport their weaker
members across. Also wow how is this not a meme?
They pass by a road and fend off a rat attack,
before eventually running into a new warren full of very welcoming rabbits.
Despite a human providing them with fresh food daily, Fiver insists that this place
is a deathtrap, which pisses off Bigwig as he’s tired of his “everywhere is a doomed land” styck.
He yells at him to stop being such a pessimist seconds before getting trapped
in a deadly rabbit snare. Yeah, it turns out this whole area is a free-range rabbit farm.
Fortunately, Bigwig survives against all the odds utilizing the raw
power of British grumpiness then they all hightail it out of there.
A badly hurt Captain Holly catches up to them with a terrible story of
the old Warrens culling at the hands of indifferent human builders and oh boy
it is viscerally disturbing in both versions of the story. Egads.
Eventually, they all make it to a hilly area called Watership Down (real place by the way)
which even Fiver agrees would make for a pretty sweet dig so they set up shop and get fabulous.
A rather aggressive gull with a nebulous European accent named Kehaar is discovered
injured on their turf and they befriend him by providing food while he heals up,
which proves to be a wise decision as they quickly realise they’re going to need HIS
help to solve an incredibly serious problem they now face: They have no one to FUCK.
No God please no! No!
Kehaar goes out scouting for any nearby Rabbit settlements they might be able to
recruit some does from, while Hazel leads a mission to jailbreak someone’s pets,
partially succeeding but getting shot in the leg in the process and assumed dead by the others.
Fiver’s supernatural powers once again save the day,
allowing him to zero in on his severely wounded brother's hiding spot.
Kehaar returns and reveals the exact location of Efrafa, a relatively close warren from which they
might be able to grab some breeder bunnies but Holly advises them that it would be a bad idea as
that particular burrow is under the Rabbit equivalent of military dictatorship.
Freedom of movement there is strictly controlled by a very aggressive Owsla
under the command of General Woundwort, a rabbit so insanely aggressive he comes off
more as a predator than a prey animal. Anyone who attempts to leave is either killed or
mutilated and left as a living example of those who cross him.
Deciding the risk is worth the hot bunny sex reward, Hazel leads a strike team to Efrafa and
Big Wig infiltrates them by pretending to be an opportunistic Owsla recruit.
He singles out some Does who clearly want out and insists on springing a
rabbit named Blackavar as well when he sees the disfigurement Woundwort ordered done to him.
He busts them out and the group manages to escape with the help of Kehaar’s air support and
by putting the sailing experience they picked up on their travels to good use.
Things seem great for a bit but unfortunately,
a consumed with rage Woundwort had them tracked back to their new home and lays siege to it.
Hazel comes up with a master plan to go and lead a guard dog from a local farm
to the enemy and leaves Big Wig in charge of defending the borrow until they return,
which he does tenaciously at the cost of great personal injury.
Hazel’s plan succeeds and the dog scatters the invading rabbit army,
killing Woundwort as he makes a shockingly brave last stand-alone against it.
In a slight hitch, Hazel is captured by a cat during the process but her owner,
a little girl, intercedes to save and release him so
he gets to go home and everyone in Watership down lives happily ever after.
After a time skip, Hazel dies of old age and his soul is invited
to join El-ahrairah’s personal Ousler in the rabbit afterlife.
I have to admit my past experiences with adaptation led me to believe
there probably wouldn’t be any references to the rabbit’s mythology so I was pleased
when the film started with a segment about El-ahrairah and the creation of the world.
The change in animation for this segment was also a really good choice and added
to the surprising feeling of realness to this history and psuedo religion.
I also appreciated the little touches they included that a book reader would know to look
for like Woundwort actually considering Hazel's attempt to work out a good compromise for both
sides in his parlay for just a hot moment before his arrogance and pride overrule the possibility.
They also included the fact that despite being a complete arsehole,
his memory still became a bit of a legend. Because he was so fierce and fearless, the
rabbits around him were inspired to not feel like the ultimate prey animal for just a little bit,
so when his body wasn’t found they started telling
tales of him running off to another land to keep on being a total boss.
It’s a surprisingly nuanced touch in both the book and film.
Adams himself had a pretty hot take on this adaptation when questioned.
"All I can say really is that the chap who did it,
Martin Rosen, has always been a good friend of mine and I think he's made
a very good job of it in as much as the public go and see it time after time.”
"But all I can say is, it's not my rabbits. I don't think I can develop that very well,
but if you read Watership Down and then have a look at the film you'll
realise immediately that those are not the rabbits in the book.”
Well I guess it's up to me to develop that then seeing as that’s kind of the
point of my job here. Thanks Adams you lazy git.
As loyal as the plot and the dialogue is to the book some things had to be cut for
time or were just not carried over all that effectively into the film and unfortunately,
most of the character development for the main cast of rabbits was included in this.
Hazel, the supposed main character, suffers the most. In the book, his ability to plan
ahead with the help of his advisors is what set him apart from the other rabbits and
made him the best choice for their leader. The film cuts almost all of this away, assigning many
of the events he orchestrated to random chance or spur of the moment improvised decisions.
His relationship with Fiver is also supposed to be a lot more complicated as there were
many occasions in which Fiver attempted to warn Hazel of yet more impending doom only for Hazel
to ignore him for convenience’s sake, despite all the times that he had been right before.
This ties into Adams' inspiration for Fiver, the legend of Cassandra,
the profit cursed with knowing the future but never being believed when she foretold it.
Before you say anything, inspiration isn’t the same thing as allegory.
There are multiple characters from the book who are mentioned by name
but are just… There. Never really directly influencing the plot in any meaningful way.
Big Wig is pretty much the only character who retains his original
arc. Showing his journey from being aggressive, impatient and harsh to
someone a lot more compassionate and thoughtful to those weaker than him.
Combined with the extremely heavy role he plays in the second half of the book,
the end result is Bigwig kind of takes over being the film’s protagonist.
Woundwort is another thing I think the film
probably did the best they could have done with but still falls a bit short of the original.
I’m not going to lie, This bunny was legit intimidating as heck in the book.
The problem is, his sense of presence is rather akin to the way that Stephen
King’s monsters are frightening. It’s not because they’re super scary to look at,
but because the author is really good at making you feel the POV character’s fear.
You just can’t convey the inner feeling of shitting your mind-pants when someone
looks at you in the same way in a film so all they could do was make him look
gruff as fuck and have him violently murder someone as soon as possible.
The film skips over SOME of the blood related graphic content of the book,
but actually leans more heavily into the dark tones and imagery.
A layover in a barn is replaced with a creepy graveyard
and they drop the juxtaposition of the pelt farm rabbit’s home seeming super nice and
welcoming while actually being a deathtrap, to just being creeping as fuck in general.
There’s also some effort to tone down the rabbit misogyny just a tad. They couldn’t
introduce any extra female characters without having to kill them off to
not impede the important plot beats, but they at least cut out lines like “Anyway,
what's a doe more or less?” when one of them dies horribly.
One of my favourite moments from the book ended up being extremely underwhelming in the film. During
the climactic battle Fiver, rather unhelpfully at first, falls into a trance but lets out a scream
in an unnatural, un-rabbitlike voice so incredibly terrible it scares off their attackers for a bit.
They got something down there that’s strange. GET OUT. GET OUT.
Oh yes. Utterly Terrifying.
Not entirely surprisingly the opening section turned out to be
the only one of the many stories about El-ahrairah to make it into the film.
Lets face it, there’s really no way they could have included that
many total segways into a film and still have something watchable at the end, but
their absence is felt in the story nonetheless, not just because they were really interesting and
not just as a world-building technique but because they proved to be more involved in
the rest of the book than expected as Hazel’s plans to save the Watership Down burrow at the end
took a little inspiration from every story that had been told throughout.
Adams managed to tie all the parts of the book together while also providing a surprisingly
realistic example of why oral histories were so useful to ancient cultures, passing down
skills and useful ways of thinking between the generations through these fantastical stories.
As per adaptation modus operandi, a few side characters were either omitted or
conglomerated into the leads. Additional rabbits that left
with the refugees or turned up with Holly later, that sort of thing.
In addition to Kehaar the gull, Hazel also flexed his interspecies alliance
forming skills when he saves a mouse from a bird of prey.
His little friend returned the favor later when his people gave them much needed early
warning of Woundwort’s approach. Another example of Hazel’s leadership sadly absent.
FINAL THOUGHTS
So yeah, Adams was on the money. While the plot is crazy accurate all
the characters are so watered down they’re not really his rabbits anymore.
That said, I maintain the movie as a whole is ahead of most adaptations for book loyalty.
You certainly can’t claim they didn’t take the bad with the good when it came to being
a story with no ideal demographic, and I don’t think what they had to change
necessarily subtracts from the quality of the film.
It’s not Adam’s rabbit but it’s still a pretty impressive adaptation.
So fun trivia: Adams originally planned for Big Wig to die of his injuries after
saving the warren, but his heroic end was vetoed by his daughters who had fallen in
love with the character. That’s kind of fucking adorable I have to admit.
As mentioned, he went on to write a sequel,
then he moved onto other types of animals suffering horribly then
in a bit of a twist onto erotic thriller. Several of these were also turned into movies.
In 1999 Watership Down was adapted again, this time into a TV series that ran for 3 seasons and
once again starred an impressive alumni of British talent including Stephen Fry,
Dawn French, Rik Mayall, John Hurt, and Richard Briers.
It returned yet again in 2018 on Netflix starring James McAvoy, John Boyega, and Ben Kingsley.
Apparently Watership Down is just where it’s at for the big names in British acting.
Over the years it also spread into radio, theatre and even role-playing games.
Unfortunately, there is a bit of an *eepp* in the history of this first adaptation. When Adams was
sadly on his way out at the ripe old age of 96, his now adult daughters were managing his estate
for him and discovered evidence that Martin Rosen, their father’s lifelong close friend
had been illegally claiming ownership of the complete copyright to Watership Down,
withholding huge amounts of royalties gained from merchandise and other adaptations that
should have been going to the financially struggling Adams and his family.
It looks like they held off on the lawsuit until after their father’s passing,
possibly sparing him from finding out about his best friend’s betrayal but
once it got started Rosen had to fork out a LOT of cash.
It’s worth noting that Rosen never made any sort of public comment about this, so as
damning as the evidence seems, please remember that we are only getting one side of this story.
Thank you for joining me my Beautiful Watchers, if you enjoyed this episode be
sure to do that good liking, sharing, commenting and subscribing if you’re new, and check out my
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