Led by a stouthearted pair of brothers, they travel forth from their native Sandleford warren through harrowing trials to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society. Set in the Hampshire Downs in Southern England, an idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of “suspense, hot pursuit, and derring-do” ( Chicago Tribune) follows a band of rabbits in flight from the incursion of man and the destruction of their home. Richard Adams’s Watership Down is a timeless classic and one of the most beloved novels of all time. Now a Netflix animated miniseries starring James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, and Oscar and Grammy award-winner Sir Ben Kingsley.Ī worldwide bestseller for more than forty years, Watership Down is the compelling tale of a band of wild rabbits struggling to hold onto their place in the world-“a classic yarn of discovery and struggle” ( The New York Times). This is a series full of foreboding, suspense, and bloody battle sequences, all set against a slate gray landscape of misty downs, teeming with predators and studded with barbed wire.WINNER of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class Animated Program The episode titles-“The Journey,” “The Raid,” “The Escape,” “The Siege”-give you an idea of the tone and mood. The world of rabbits has class friction as well, and sexual politics, and a terrifying dictator rabbit, General Woundwort, who runs a burrow that looks a lot like a concentration camp. Our hero rabbits, Fiver, Hazel, and Bigwig, and the others are caught between the spoiling forces of human civilization (they escape a burrow before it is decimated by backhoes) and the brutality of nature (birds, fox, dog, cat). The themes were proving a little tricky to explain anyway.
Or so I kept telling my kids, who half-watched the first two episodes with a mixture of confusion (“Daddy is that a bad rabbit or a good rabbit?”) and diving-behind-the-sofa terror. Watership is a survival adventure, four hours of peril, and it’s superb. And while the new series is less scary than that ’78 film, this is still nature red in tooth and claw. Digital animation has rendered the rabbits stunningly realistic-mangy, scarred, rain-soaked, and muddy. It’s full of furry creatures, though none are all that cute. (Its fright factor is legendary, right up there with that animated nightmare from the 1980s The Secret of NIMH.) Netflix’s new four-part adaptation, a coproduction with the BBC that starts streaming on December 23, also comes with qualifications.
And the 1978 animated film is definitely too violent and terrifying for them. The classic children’s novel by Richard Adams, about a band of rabbits trying to establish a safe home in the English countryside, is a little too subtle and complex for (young) children.
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