All the world will be your enemy,
Prince with a Thousand Enemies,
And when they catch you, they will kill you...
But first they must catch you.
But first they must catch you.
Generally when you think hand-drawn animation, you think
Bambi, Snow White, or early renditions of Spongebob. Bunnies' eyes rolling back
into their heads, bunnies coughing up blood and bunnies being both shot and
taken by hawks isn't generally something you'd put in the morning cartoons.
And yet Watership Down (1978, directed by Martin Rosen)
manages to feature grotesque sequences like this, but so beautifully drawn,
uniquely animated and accompanied by incredibly moving, haunting music, that I
consider it a cult classic.
Classics are movies that everyone should or has seen and
that will be remembered for generations. Cult classics, however, are those
treasured by a very select demographic and savoured for their unusual takes on
film genres. For example, author of the 1972 novel 'Watership Down', Richard
Adams, constructed a fictional language known as Lapine that was spoken on occasion by
the characters, and this also features in the film.
In Watership Down, an idyllic community of rabbits is torn
between fear and anger when Fiver, a lowly runt, experiences horrific visions.
Blood seeps out of the neighbouring wood, filling their field, and Fiver
instinctively knows it is the blood of his warren.
He is dismissed as insane; a troublemaker. But those
affected by his warning escape with him into the countryside to find safety.
The obstacles they face would terrorize humans, let alone a
small group of rabbits. They narrowly escape the jaws of a rabid badger, or
Lendri as it is known in their rabbit folklore. Terrorized by hawk, rat, cat,
dog, human, and rabbit alike, they repeatedly attempt to seek refuge with other
warrens. One warren, while accepting of them, has a menacing air. Sure enough,
they fail to mention the maze of snares surrounding their territory, one of which
chokes and almost kills Bigwig, a former member of the warren's policing force.
Later in the film, a rival and highly militarized warren
called Efrafa discovers their trail, but it is Fiver's visions that provide the
protagonist with a solution.
This battle between the demons of hallucination and psychosis, and those of
territorial enemy is a focal point that I took from the film. Gory scenes,
involving dying rabbits being scraped at with bulldozers, poisoned and
mutilated, are disturbing on some levels. But they act to reflect not just a
message opposing environmental abuse, but a commentary on civilized human
empires. The rabbits exiled Fiver as a minority, believing that their current
life was sustainable despite warning. This resulted in their culling as their society
was literally poisoned from the inside out.
This can and will happen to today's empires. Warnings are
not heeded, and devastation will occur, and much worse than a fright from a
badger.
Interestingly, Watership Down plays a cameo in another cult
classic, the psychological thriller/sci-fi Donnie Darko, and on a wider context
the films are remarkably similar. The main characters both experience mental
distortion, in terrorizing and sometimes helpful visions. They are both excused, but their visions are true- and their worlds ultimately come to an end.
It is this element of the films that we can only pray is
fiction. If the visions of those who experience psychotic disorders and
episodes are warnings, we should be quickly hopping away to safer hills as
fast as we can.
Watership Down remains one of my favourite films, although I
am yet to read the book… and slightly hesitant to. Animated features involving
animals are often not true to the novel, eliminating some of the violence and
disturbing themes to suit wider audiences. While The Fox and the Hound is a
delightful, adorable movie I grew up with, the novel involves multiple litters
of foxes being shot, burned and gassed, and rather than a broken leg, the
antagonist’s dog dies instantly when hit by a train.
And yet in Watership Down, the violence is often both
created by and inflicted on animals, because sometimes it takes a depiction of
ourselves in a fluffy bundle of joy to realise how malicious we really are.