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. Watership Down, by Richard Adams is also available as an audio book and it was adapted as an animated film. Their story is one of Escape, Recovery, Consolation and Eucatastrophe, and, in the end, it is our story too. The episode titles-“The Journey,” “The Raid,” “The Escape,” “The Siege”-give you an idea of the tone and mood. Be cunning, and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed. 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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