SparkNotes: Watership Down: Context Watership Down Table of Contents Plot Overview Richard Adams was born in Newbury, Berkshire, England, in 1920. He served in the British Army from 1940 through 1946, during World War II. In 1948 Adams received a mater's degree from Worcester College at Oxford University. He worked as a civil servant from 1948 to 1974, and since 1974 has been a fulltime author. Adams wrote his first novel, Watership Down, while still a civil servant in 1972. The novel won him the Carnegie Medal and was a large success in England, but did not bring him true fame until it was widely heralded in the United States. Adams has written several other novels, including Shardik (1974), The Plague Dogs (1977), and Traveller (1988). In 1991, he published an autobiography, The Day Gone By, and five years later published the sequel to Watership Down, entitled Tales From Watership Down (1996).

Watership Down has remained Adams's most successful novel, popular with both adults and children. Although several of his other books have sold well, none of them has ever come close to reaching the critical acclaim of Watership Down. Adams is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Arts. Much of Watership Down takes place in the area where Richard Adams grew up. The detailed descriptions of the natural world in which the rabbits live, therefore, stem from his actual experiences. Adams has seen the places that he writes about; although the novel is fantasy, it is geographically accurate. Watership Down has been viewed as a statement about nature, an attempt to give us a glimpse into the beautiful yet removed world of the woods and grasslands. Humankind destroys animals' environments at a frightening rate, and yet does so without any real knowledge of what it is doing. Adams presents rabbits as intelligent, caring, feeling creatures who undergo many trials and misfortunes for the sole purpose of finding a home where they can leave out their lives. The book often carries a tone that suggests that humanity has lost something it used to have—the ability to live free, as the rabbits do.

The notion that people should live as a part of nature rather than apart from nature is a strong undercurrent that flows through much of the work. Indeed, the novel's popularity stems not just from the enjoyable story itself, but also from the societal implications that can easily be found in it. At times, Watership Down is almost pleading in tone, suggesting that we still have time to stop our destruction of animals' homes before it is too late—an idea that appeals to many. However, the novel is not simply a message about the way we should treat animals. It is also a story about life, as the rabbits' lives in the rabbit warrens bring up many strong parallels to human societies. However Watership Down is read—as a political, social, or environmental critique or simply as a book about the search for a home and life—it is undoubtedly greatly influenced by the state of the natural world in the twentieth century and the role that humanity must play within that world.

Watership Down web sites Kill off 'infuriating' rabbits, Watership Down author says Man behind beloved novel supports cyanide cull Bruce Ward Friday 14 August 1998 The Ottawa Citizen It may come as a shock to the millions who loved his book, but Richard Adams is 'not a fluffy bunny sort of person at all.' England's Rabbits Lose Their Greatest Ally: The rabbit Fiver, shown here in a still from the film version of Watership Down, looks down in horror at a rabbit warren running red with blood. Now, in the part of England where the book is set, exterminators plan to flood rabbit warrens with cyanide gas to kill off an out-of-control rabbit population -- a move Richard Adams, who wrote the book, calls 'a regrettable necessity.' Run, Fiver, run. Bigwig, be very afraid. Thousands of rabbits are awaiting extermination in England, and Watership Down author Richard Adams is turning his back. Mr.

Adams, whose 1972 bestseller brought rabbits to the forefront of literature, sees the coming slaughter of rabbits in England as a "regrettable necessity." In October, rabbit warrens in the country's rural South Downs area will be destroyed with cyanide gas to bring the rabbit population there under control. It's a measure Mr. Adams, 78, accepts with equanimity. "I've never been one of these sentimentalists. I'm not a fluffy bunny sort of person at all," Mr. Adams told a London newspaper. "If I saw a rabbit in my garden, I'd shoot it." In 1972, Mr. Adams chronicled the quest of a rebel band of Berkshire rabbits for a new home, a warren where they could live in peace. The fantasy, with its allegorical overtones, caught the public's fancy, and Watership Down became an international besteller. An animated film version of the book was made in 1978. But the rabbits apparently have lost their greatest ally. "When they see a row of lettuces they have an annoying habit of taking a bite out of each one them moving on," said Mr.

Adams, who lives in a village in Hampshire, where Watership Down is set. "It would make it less infuriating if they ate the whole thing, but no, they take a little nibble out of them all. "It's a habit, a bit like cocaine. Once they start, they want more and more." Watership Down, Mr. Adams's first book, began as a tale he told to his daughters on a car trip. It carries the dedication "To Juliet and Rosamond, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon." Besides selling millions of copies, the book was also a literary success, enchanting the critics. "Magically well made and memorable," gushed the New York Times. The Manchester Guardian called it "a great book ... A whole world is created, perfectly real in itself, yet constituting a deep incidental comment on human affairs." Mr. Adams's views on the fate of the South Down rabbits mirror the bloody world he created in Watership Down. His fictional rabbits are shot, gassed, and choked in snares. When the bucks battle, they rip each other with their claws.

At the Swan's Hotel pub in the village of Kingsclere -- near the top of the actual Watership Down -- there was strong support yesterday for Mr. Adams. "It's not our patch, but there's too many rabbits there in the South Downs," local resident Martin Boyce said in a telephone interview. "They should have done something before. Now they have to get rid of the rabbits, as Mr. Adams is saying." Don't count out the rabbits just yet. In one of the book's most famous passages, Dandelion recounts the story of how Frith, "who made the world," blesses El-ahrairah, the Prince Rabbit. "All the world will be your enemy, Prince With a Thousand Enemies. And wherever they catch you, they will kill you. "But first, they must catch you -- digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed." **************************************** My afternoon with Richard Adams by Jamie Cohen Spring 1999 (House Rabbit Society) "Richard professes to have done a lot for animal welfare.

Besides helping to make it very difficult to buy a fur coat in London now, from 1980 to 1982, Richard served as president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. I told them how I got into animal rights because of rabbits. "I learned of them using rabbits in animal testing, putting them in stockades and dripping things in their eyes. I know they all have sweet little personalities like my rabbits." He agreed that testing on them is terrible. He is very aware intense confinement issues, human health, environmental issues. He said, "Plague Dogs was deliberately set up to satirize animal experimentation as well as government and tabloid press. It was set up at England's lake district where Elizabeth and I went on our honeymoon." Watership Down author Richard Adams: I just can’t do humans | Books | The Guardian Fiction Watership Down author Richard Adams: I just can’t do humans Watership Down, a story Richard Adams made up to scare his kids in the car, was rejected seven times before it became a classic.

As a new illustrated edition is published, the author tells Alison Flood why he loves making children wince and weep Bedtime chiller … Richard Adams, now 94, at home in Hampshire. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian Sunday 4 January 2015 04.59 EST Last modified on Sunday 4 January 2015 19.10 EST Share on Messenger Close Richard Adams, no stranger to terrifying children with his tales of rabbits being snared or gassed, narrows his eyes and recites, word-perfect, a lengthy passage from an intensely creepy short story by MR James called The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral . The author of Watership Down has been remembering, with some pride, how he used to petrify his children with scary stories at bedtime. “When you’re little,” he says, “you don’t distinguish between fiction and reality. It’s all reality. And thank goodness for that. I do not believe in talking down to children. Readers like to be upset, excited and bowled over.

I can remember weeping when I was little at upsetting things that were read to me, but fortunately my mother and father were wise enough to keep going.” Adams, 94, is ensconced in an armchair in front of the fire in his 18th-century home in Whitchurch, Hampshire, where he and his wife Elizabeth have lived for the last 30 years. Appropriately enough, there are a few small rabbit statues under one of the tables. Next door, in a vast and higgledy-piggedly library, books are stacked to the ceiling. Elizabeth is watching him chat from the sofa, as is Ros, one of his daughters. “Yes,” says Ros, “he told us scary stories. And I wasn’t able to sleep.” Watership Down was one of the first of these stories. Adams was 52 and working for the civil service when his daughters began pleading with him to tell them a story on the drive to school.

“I had been put on the spot and I started off, ‘Once there were two rabbits called Hazel and Fiver.’ And I just took it on from there.” Extraordinarily, he had never written a word of fiction before, but once he’d seen the story through to the end, his daughters said it was “too good to waste, Daddy, you ought to write that down”. An Aldo Galli illustration for the new edition Photograph: PR He began writing in the evenings, and the result, an exquisitely written story about a group of young rabbits escaping from their doomed warren, won him both the Carnegie medal and the Guardian children’s prize. “It was rather difficult to start with,” he says. “I was 52 when I discovered I could write. I wish I’d known a bit earlier. I never thought of myself as a writer until I became one.” To create his rabbit characters, he drew from people he had met and from the world of literature. Bigwig was based on an officer he had known in the war, a great fighter at his best when given explicit orders, while Fiver was derived from Cassandra , the figure from Greek mythology who had the power of prophecy.

Kipling, writes Adams in an introduction to a beautifully illustrated new edition of the book, showed him that he could let his rabbits think and talk, but keep them otherwise entirely rabbity. Meanwhile, RM Lockley ’s The Private Life of the Rabbit taught him about the animal’s characteristics. And Watership Down is a real place, in Hampshire. At first, Adams had no idea he had written something special. He sent the manuscript out to publishers, seven of whom rejected it. “It happened time after time. I got so disappointed I couldn’t bear to take the manuscript back. I used to send Elizabeth to collect it.” Eventually, he sent the pages to the small publisher Rex Collings, who took it on. The first print run, in 1972, was just 2,500 copies – all Collings could afford. But the reviews were staggering, and it has now sold in the millions. “I’ve become a different person with that book. It’s there and I’m behind it, somehow. I don’t go around swanking about it, I try not to.

But I have become the person who told those stories.” Interpretation after interpretation has been laid on Watership Down, from allegory to a take on religion. Adams rejects them all. “It was meant to be just a story, and it remains that. A story, a jolly good story I must admit, but it remains a story. It’s not meant to be a parable. That’s important, I think. Its power and strength come from being a story told in the car.” They might just be rabbits, but the protagonists of Watership Down travel to some dark places, from Bigwig getting trapped in the snare (a harrowing, unforgettable scene that Elizabeth tried to convince her husband to remove) to the young bucks drawn into the creepy, cult-like atmosphere of Cowslip’s warren. And then, of course, there are the confrontations with the scheming rabbit General Woundwort, founder of the Efrafa warren. “Yes, I remain pleased with Woundwort. He is terrifying. He’s the making of it, really. It wouldn’t be the same without him.” He does his reciting-from-memory thing again.

“The text says, ‘General Woundwort was never seen again.’ But he has spoken of being able to survive in the wild. And it says, ‘So it may perhaps be that, after all, that extraordinary rabbit really did wander away to live his fierce life somewhere else.’” Before Adams had even found a publisher, he had already started on Shardik , his remarkable tale of a wounded bear who is found by a hunter and believed to be the reincarnation of God. Paid homage to by Stephen King in his Dark Tower series , the book has also just been reissued, the cover bearing a quote hailing it as his masterpiece. Adams isn’t quite so sure about that today. “Shardik – it’s readable, isn’t it?” he says, adding that his best work might be The Plague Dogs, about two hounds on the run from a horrific animal-research centre. An Aldo Galli illustration for the new edition Photograph: PR Adams was still working at the civil service when he wrote Shardik , and his family remember him striding around the house muttering the inexplicable phrase “Shardik, the power of God!” under his breath. “I was a different person in those days,” he says.

“I probably seem very self-confident, probably quite annoying, to you now, but in those days I wasn’t self-confident. It was a struggle to get anything done and know it was all right.” Collings published Shardik to a positive, if more muted, reception. “They were all expecting more rabbits, but of course they didn’t get them. That was why Shardik, well, it wasn’t a failure, but for a lot of people it wasn’t what they were expecting. It didn’t get the reception it might have.” The writing got easier. Adams even wrote a prequel to Shardik about a girl who is sold into slavery (there’s lots of sex). Most recent was Daniel, his 2006 novel about a boy born on a plantation in 1759, which he isn’t entirely impressed by today. “I just thought I’d better try to write a novel about real people in a real setting, so I made myself do it, but I didn’t expect it to be an outstanding success, and it isn’t. I can’t write about real people. I proved that to myself with Daniel. I’m a fantasist.” Nothing, anyway, has lived up to his debut.

“I try to look at it in a positive way, to say to myself, ‘Look at Watership Down – if you can do that, you can do any ruddy thing.’ Of course you can’t expect to have another success like that, but it does give you the confidence and the enjoyment to go on writing.” Today, he works every other day. “I’m ancient now. I couldn’t write under the sort of pressure I had with my early books.” Despite his experience of Daniel, the work in progress is about a boy, kidnapped when he was younger, now a cabin boy with the Spanish armada. “I mean to tell the story from the boy’s point of view, with plenty of action,” he says. “And plenty of, yes, horrible things.” • The new edition of Watership Down with illustrations by Aldo Galli, published by Oneworld, is out now.

Adams’ novel first published in 1972 became one of the bestselling children’s books of all time Published: 28 Dec 2016 Author of the classic 1970s novel Watership Down, the allegorical tale of a colony of rabbits Published: 27 Dec 2016 In Watership Down, he created a book ahead of its time, a multi-layered novel that appealed to adults and children alike. But Adams was no one-hit wonder Published: 28 Dec 2016 All-star cast includes John Boyega, James McAvoy, Ben Kingsley, Gemma Arterton, Olivia Colman, Anne-Marie Duff and Nicholas Hoult Published: 27 Apr 2016 Google+ Sponsor Message <a href="" target="_top"><img style="border:0px;" src="" alt="i" width="300" height="250"/></a> In the mid-1950s, naturalist Ronald Lockley undertook a study on behalf of the British Nature Conservancy, which was concerned about the spread of a rabbit disease called myxomatosis .

In a grassy meadow in Wales, Lockley created several enclosures in which tagged European rabbits lived. But rabbits spend much of their lives underground, in a mass of tunnels and rooms known as a warren. So Lockley also created an artificial warren that backed up against a small hut with a plate glass window that let an observer see what the bunnies were doing. And for four years, Lockley recorded interactions among his rabbit subjects. The result was the first study of life in a rabbit warren, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology in 1961. But soon Lockley, a prolific writer, expanded his findings into a book, The Private Life of the Rabbit , published in 1964. Within the warren, Lockley had discovered a complex society, headed by a dominant male and female who were given precedence by lower-ranked animals. The two were mates, and the top female got the best spot in the warren for her offspring. Dominance was related to age, Lockley found, and rarely did a rabbit reach the top spot before 18 months old.

And the male kept his position by patrolling the group’s territory and putting on displays of aggression — or even fighting — to keep the others in line. The complex behavior found in rabbit warrens was unknown when this education film, produced by the British Council, was released in 1945.Tomorrow Always Comes/YouTube Lockley’s work was an important addition to the science of rabbits, and it would soon become immortalized in fiction. When Englishman Richard Adams sat down to write a children’s tale about a group of bunnies, he turned to The Private Life of the Rabbit “to make the rabbits as convincing as possible,” he wrote in an introduction to his book, Watership Down , published in 1972. For those of you who last read Watership Down in middle school, the book is the tale of a group of rabbits as they leave their home warren, which was soon to be destroyed, to make a new home on the land known as Watership Down, a real hill in Hampshire, England, near where Adams grew up. The rabbits are anthropomorphized, and, as might be expected with a children’s tale, there is plenty that is not based in reality.

Rabbit society, for instance, does not have a military caste. But Lockley’s work had a profound impact on the book. Adams even consulted Lockley and asked the scientist to read a final draft. Lockley “contributed several good suggestions,” Adams noted in his introduction. “I remember, in particular, that he devised the passage … in which the rabbits raid Nuthanger Farm” and release some captive domestic bunnies. The two became friends, and they would walk together through the countryside. They also traveled together to Antarctica (after which they co-wrote the book Voyage Through the Antarctic ). Lockley would go on to write some 60 books, mostly about islands or birds, before his death in 2000. Adams, now 95, still writes every day, he told the Guardian earlier this year. And scientists are still discovering more about the behavior of European rabbits. For instance, there is some evidence that not all rabbits may bother building complex warrens. Group living may be common only in exposed areas where predation risk is high. In such a situation, it can be dangerous for a rabbit to branch off the main group and build a new burrow.

Sticking together and living in the existing warren is the safer choice. But when there is ground cover, rabbits can more easily split apart and build their own homes without being seen by something that considers a bunny an easy meal. A few years ago, the BBC produced a series of nature shows that investigated the lives of three burrowing animals — badgers, water voles and European rabbits. To watch the rabbits, the producers built a warren, lining one end with glass through which they could film. In the show, the host claimed “this has to be the first time that any human being has had this sort of view of a rabbit warren underground.” Well, no, it wasn’t. And if we had to wait until now for such a view, we might not have the book that has entertained so many of us for decades. 11 Fascinating Facts About 'Watership Down' | Mental Floss 11 Fascinating Facts About 'Watership Down' istock (blank book) Like us on Facebook Like a lot of classic books, Watership Down almost didn’t make it to print.

After at least seven rejections, author Richard Adams, then 54 and a civil servant, was on the verge of self-publishing the novel when it was finally picked up by Rex Collings, a one-man publishing outfit in London. Collings wrote to a friend at the time, “I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad? ” His decision may have been mad, but it paid off. In 1972, Collings printed as many books as he could afford, a run of 2,500. They sold out immediately. The book went on to win the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children’s Prize, to sell more than 50 million copies worldwide, and to launch Adams’ second career. Though Watership Down was far and away Adams’ most successful book (which he acknowledged, telling an interviewer in 2007, “You can't expect another miracle like Watership Down. One's enough for any lifetime!”), Adams continues to write.

His last book, Daniel, was published in 2006 and in 2014, at the age of 94, he told a Telegraph interviewer that he was still working, thinking up a story about an ordinary boy who finds himself on the deck of a ship fighting the Spanish Armada. Here are a few things that you might not have known about the phenomenon that became Watership Down. 1. Watership Down wasn’t called Watership Down. Rex Collings, the intrepid publisher who took a chance on the then-unknown Adams, was the first to suggest calling the novel Watership Down. The original title was Hazel and Fiver, after the quiet leader Hazel and his seer brother, Fiver, whose visions of the destruction of their home inspires the group’s epic adventure. 2. Fiver's prediction was disturbingly accurate. Watership Down starts in Sandleford Warren, a real place in rural(ish) Berkshire, England, which is quite likely home to many rabbits.

But perhaps not for much longer: In February 2012, the West Berkshire council approved a plan to bulldoze and pave over what was Sandleford Warren to make way for 2000 new homes , despite protests from Adams and others. As of this writing, however, the proposed development, Sandleford Park , was still in its early planning stages. 3. Watership Down began as a way for Adams to entertain his daughters … Adams told BBC in 2007 that the story started on a long car ride: He and his two daughters were going to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Judi Dench in a production of Twelfth Night. His elder daughter demanded a story to pass the time. "This called for spontaneity, it had to, and I just began off the top of my head: 'Once upon a time there were two rabbits, called eh, let me see, Hazel and Fiver, and I'm going to tell you about some of their adventures,'” he explained.

“What followed was really the essence of Watership Down.” The story continued over the next few months during the morning school run; Adams told The Telegraph in 2014 that he’d go to bed forming the narrative in his mind, ready to tell the girls the next morning. In a way, the continually-forming story was Adams’ attempt to be a constant, steady presence in his daughters’ lives: “I’ve got a thing about that. Parents ought to spend a lot of time in their children’s company. A lot of them don’t, you know.” The girls demanded that he write down the ensuing story, although it took 18 months for him to actually put pen to paper. 4. ... But it's not really for children.

When it was published in America in 1974, The New York Times' reviewer noted that though the story began as a tale for little girls, he doubted that the novel was really “aimed at children,” explaining, “I can’t imagine many readers under the age of 13 or 14 … having the patience and grasp of extended allegorical strategies to persevere to the end of a 426-page epic about a community of rabbits.” Adams agreed—but not because of the book's length, or because of its dark, fairly grim imagery. He later noted , “I’ve always said that Watership Down is not a book for children. I say: it's a book, and anyone who wants to read it can read it.” 5. Adams likes that his book is scary. Parents were surprised that a book about anthropomorphized rabbits could have so much death and violence. One of his daughters reported not being able to sleep after his stories, and Adams’ wife, Elizabeth, even tried to get him to take out the scene in which Bigwig gets caught in a snare.

When asked by a 12 year old fan why the book was so scary, Adams responded , “Good stories ought to be exciting and if they are exciting they are inevitably scary in parts!” 6. The rabbits were modeled after WWII officers ... Lieutenant Richard Adams commanded C Platoon in 250 Company’s Seaborn Echelon, and, as he wrote in his autobiography , he based Watership Down and the stories in it around the men of the 250 Airborne Light Company RASC—specifically, on their role in the battle of Arnhem. The battle, fought over nine days in September 1944 in and around the Dutch towns of Arnhem, Oosterbeek, Driel, and Wolfheze, resulted in devastating losses for the Allied forces, including in Adams’ company. Adams says that two characters were directly drawn from life.

Hazel was inspired by Adams’ commanding officer, Major John Gifford, a man he described as “brave in the most self-effacing way” and an “excellent organizer” who rarely raised his voice, adding, “Everything about him was quiet, crisp and unassuming.” Gifford survived the war; Captain Desmond “Paddy” Kavanagh , on whom warrior Bigwig was modeled, did not. Daring, debonair Kavanagh was, Adams wrote, “afraid of nothing,” a “sensationalist,” and “by nature entirely the public’s image of a parachute officer.” He was killed in action outside Oosterbeek while providing covering fire for his platoon , at just 25 years old. As for Adams, he said in 2014 that he identifies more with Fiver: “Rather timid and not much of a fighter … but able to contribute something in the way of intuitive knowledge.” 7. ... But also behaved like, well, rabbits. Adams’ knowledge of group dynamics in extremely stressful situations was well-founded, as was his knowledge of the habits of actual rabbits.

To better understand the creatures, Adams turned to British naturalist Ronald Lockley’s 1964 book, The Private Life of the Rabbit. After the novel came out, Adams and Lockley became friends and—as friends do—took a trip to Antarctica together, and later collaborated on a book about the experience. 8. Adams didn't want anyone to read too much into it. In the 40-plus years since its publication, Watership Down has been assigned all kinds of different meanings by readers who think they know what it’s really about. Theorists often latch on to the folkloric elements of the story, or attempt to interpret it as a religious allegory. Adams rejects these efforts : “It was meant to be just a story, and it remains that. A story—a jolly good story, I must admit—but it remains a story. It’s not meant to be a parable. That’s important, I think. Its power and strength come from being a story told in the car.” 9. It inspired its own role-playing game. In 1976, the bestseller encountered another phenomenon sweeping the world: Role-playing games.

Dungeons & Dragons had come out in 1974, opening up a new and surprisingly lucrative niche market that seemed adaptable to just about any genre, from space opera to the Wild West to Ancient Japan. Fantasy Games Unlimited saw an opportunity and seized it, grafting Adams’ lapine world onto a D&D gaming structure and calling the result Bunnies & Burrows . Participants pretended to be “intelligent rabbits” trying to survive food shortages and outsmart humans. Unlike D&D, however, B&B hasn’t exactly stood the test of time. 10. Art Garfunkel sang a song about it. When you think about it, anthropomorphized rabbits inhabiting an idealized, if dangerous, natural world seem like a logical topic for a folk song. In 1978, Art Garfunkel was tapped to sing “Bright Eyes,” written by Mike Batt, a song largely considered to be the theme song of the animated version of Watership Down. The song, which Garfunkel later recorded for his 1979 album Fate for Breakfast, became the number one single in the UK that year. 11. Adams wishes he had started writing earlier.

Before Watership Down, Adams hadn’t written a word. In an interview with The Guardian in 2015, he said, “I was 52 when I discovered I could write. I wish I’d known a bit earlier. I never thought of myself as a writer until I became one.” But Adams also acknowledges that nothing he’s done since has matched the power of his debut: “I try to look at it in a positive way, to say to myself, ‘Look at Watership Down – if you can do that, you can do any ruddy thing.’ Of course you can’t expect to have another success like that, but it does give you the confidence and the enjoyment to go on writing.” Watership Down / The Dissolve by Tasha Robinson From the first paragraph onward, Richard Adams’ bestselling 1972 novel Watership Down politely indicates that it isn’t meant for children. Though it’s a fable-like fantasy about talking bunnies on a quest, it’s written with a rich, sophisticated prose style, and it takes a deep, adult fascination with environmental detail: the specifics of wildflower growing seasons, actual animal behavior, and real-world geography.

Martin Rosen’s 1978 animated adaptation, on the other hand, begins with less of a warning about its content. In the biggest opening-scene fake-out until Team America: World Police, Rosen opens with a stylized, cartoony rabbit origin myth that famously failed to tip off parents that this was a graphically bloody grown-up movie, not a kiddie fairy tale. For a few minutes, Watership Down does look like a children’s cartoon. Then Rosen pulls away from the story-in-a-story, and enters an Adams-inspired, sophisticated world of naturalistic animation, brought to life with all the realism he and his team could manage. It’s the work of a director deeply enamored of his source material, and determined to do right by it, even if it means frightening kids, baffling parents, and embracing whatever style works in the moment. Watership Down the animated feature was a true labor of love for Rosen, who had never directed a film and had never worked in animation, but learned the business from base principles, and created a studio from scratch, all to bring a book he loved to the screen.

In a new interview on the Criterion Blu-ray edition, he talks about the advantage of working from a prestigious bestseller—every British celebrity he approached to voice a character immediately agreed—but admits the film was an uphill climb. Making it was slow and expensive, but it’s also clear, watching it today, that Rosen was operating more from a desire to honor material he loved than any practical efforts to keep costs down, streamline or punch up the story, or make it accessible to a broad demographic. Watership Down follows a small band of rabbits, led by Hazel (John Hurt) and his runt brother Fiver (Richard Briers) in an attempt to escape Fiver’s premonition of doom coming to their warren. They travel overland together in a way that’s stressfully unnatural for rabbits—like Adams’ book, the film tries to keep close to animals’ biology and instinct-driven psychology instead of heavily anthropomorphizing—but their individual strengths and determination let them bond through a series of adventures. Then, once they achieve safety, they realize they have no mates, and they have to endanger themselves again to solve the problem.

The material could easily have been treated lightly—and was, in a garishly perky episodic British TV version of the story Rosen produced in 1999—but what makes the 1978 version exceptional is its gravity and melancholy. Adams’ conception of Watership Down was a story about prey animals with “a thousand enemies,” and the film version in no ways compromises the seriousness and threat of living in a vast world of predators and unknowns, humanity chief in both categories. The 1978 Watership Down is very much animation of its time, with glimpses of Rankin-Bass’ 1977 Hobbit in the gnarled, abstracted painted backdrops of rabbit tunnels; of 1973’s Charlotte’s Web in the repeated establishing shots of insects and grass in the breeze; and of France’s 1973 surrealistic wonder Fantastic Planet in an early glimpse of a photorealistic rabbit, seen in rigidly elaborate, painted close-up.

Indie animator John Hubley worked on the film briefly in the concept stage, and some of his abstraction shows through, but it’s mated with Disney-esque attention to the body language and motion of animals, captured through long study of live rabbits in the studio. And the Watership Down crew went beyond Disney in trying to ground their film in reality. The down Adams wrote about is a real place in England, and he used its real geography. Rosen took a helicopter and an away team of animators there to film it from above, to lock down the realism of their fantastically detailed layouts. Rosen’s script sticks tightly to Adams’ novel, departing only in small details, and thoroughly embracing its violence: The images of fighting rabbits foaming at the mouth and dripping garish red blood from open gashes are still shockingly graphic, even in a more indulgent age. Watership Down has its notable visual flaws, where budget or talent provided hard limits. And it can be a curiously inert, quiet movie, with only small rises and falls in action, or action that occasionally feels too rushed to connect.

But its characterizations, its dedication to detail and to mood, and its uncompromising violence all mark it as something that was rare back in 1978, and remains rare even today: an animated feature meant first and foremost for an adult audience. In some ways, it comes across as a film for an adult audience of one: Martin Rosen, who was driven by his love of the book to create a screen version in spite of his lack of experience or resources. But like so many works of art created for a single audience, its idiosyncrasies are what make it worth sharing. Special features Sadly a bit sparse, but what’s there is worthwhile. Criterion nabbed Rosen himself for a 15-minute interview during which he tells enlightening production stories, for instance about how Art Garfunkel disliked the song he cut for the film, and left it off his solo album—until the track, “Bright Eyes,” became a No. 1 hit in the U.K., whereupon he recalled and destroyed the album in order to re-release it with the song.

Rosen walks through the timeline of the film project, admitting it was an insane idea for a newbie animator to take on—he initially approached the Royal Ballet and the Royal Opera Company, as he considered different live-action options. “It’s not a sensible decision that you make, making a film,” he says, explaining how driven he felt to make the movie at any cost. “Because it’s so hard. The work is so consuming that there’s got to be something that takes over at some point.” Ultimately, he gives all the credit to Adams’ story, which helps explain why his only other feature was an animated adaptation of Adams’ novel The Plague Dogs, three years later. The 12-minute featurette with some of the animators is cute but less informative, though given Rosen’s humility, it’s amusing to see that they’re perfectly willing to take the credit he deferred. There’s also a cute bit where one of them talks about the relief of drawing Kehaar the gull (voiced by Zero Mostel) after a year of drawing rabbits.

And there’s also a 12-minute interview with Guillermo del Toro, talking intelligently about the film’s period context, and its themes of technological concern, connection with the natural world, and making peace with death. He acknowledges its visual shortcomings, but says the film never feels “sloppy in a cavalier way,” and that it’s always clear that these were proud artists, working to the limits of their technical capacity, in a “fantastic accident of many many minds colliding.” Finally, there’s a trailer featuring so much rabbit gore, it’s a wonder so many parents complained that their kids didn’t get the calming Disney cartoon they expected. GoWatchIt: Buy. Rent. Stream Watership Down ★★★★★ Watership Down (1978) - IMDb IMDb 17 January 2017 4:34 PM, UTC NEWS There was an error trying to load your rating for this title. Some parts of this page won't work property. Please reload or try later. X Beta I'm Watching This! Keep track of everything you watch; tell your friends. Error A group of rabbits flee their doomed warren and face many dangers to find and protect their new home.

Director: From $2.99 (SD) on Amazon Video ON DISC a list of 21 titles created 31 Aug 2011 a list of 47 titles created 09 Feb 2014 a list of 38 titles created 28 Aug 2014 a list of 27 titles created 7 months ago a list of 45 titles created 4 months ago Search for " Watership Down " on Amazon.com Connect with IMDb Want to share IMDb's rating on your own site? Use the HTML below. You must be a registered user to use the IMDb rating plugin. 1 win & 4 nominations. See more awards » Photos Two dogs escape from a laboratory and are hunted as possible carriers of the bubonic plague. Director: Martin Rosen Watership Down (TV Series 1999) Adventure | Animation | Fantasy The adventures of a warren of rabbits as they struggle to develop their new home & protect it from the various threats they face. Stars: Andrew Falvey, Stephen Mangan, Lee Ross A cat must investigate brutal murders of other cats in a neighborhood he has moved into with his owner.

Director: Michael Schaack A successful farmyard revolution by the resident animals vs. the farmer goes horribly wrong as the victors create a new tyranny among themselves. Directors: Joy Batchelor, John Halas Stars: Gordon Heath, Maurice Denham A naive elderly British rural couple survive the initial onslaught of a nuclear war. Director: Jimmy T. Murakami The Fellowship of the Ring embark on a journey to destroy the One Ring and end Sauron's reign over Middle-earth. Director: Ralph Bakshi Edit Storyline Based upon Richard Adam's novel of the same title, this animated feature delves into the surprisingly violent world of a warren of rabbits as they seek to establish a new colony free of tyranny and human intervention. Frightening and bloody in some scenes. Not recommended for young children. Written by Keith Loh <loh@sfu.ca> See All (82) » Taglines: 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. Genres: 1 November 1978 (USA) See more » Also Known As: Den långa flykten See more » Company Credits Did You Know?

Trivia This was the first film to feature both John Hurt and Nigel Hawthorne . Both would later star together in two other animated features, The Plague Dogs (1982) (which was also based on a Richard Adams book), and The Black Cauldron (1985). See more » Goofs After Bigwig is rescued from the snare, thanks to having the wooden peg dug out of the ground, there's a wider shot showing the snare and the wooden peg. There should be a hole near the peg to note that rabbits had just dug it out of the ground, but no hole appears. All you see is the peg lying on the ground. See more » Quotes [first lines] Narrator : Long ago, the great Frith made the world. He made all the stars and the world lived among the stars. Frith made all the animals and birds and, at first, made them all the same. Now, among the animals was El-Ahrairah, the Prince of Rabbits. He had many friends and they all ate grass together. But after a time, the rabbits wandered everywhere, multiplying and eating as they went.

Then Frith said to El-Ahrairah, "Prince Rabbit, if you cannot control your people, I shall find ways to ... Excellent animated film--more for older children and adults 6 September 2006 | by preppy-3 (United States) – See all my reviews British animated film about a bunch of rabbits leaving their old warren (which one psychic rabbit can tell is going to be destroyed) and searching for a new one. The movie recounts their adventures searching for one. It may sound like a movie ideal for little kids--but it really isn't. It's an excellent adaptation of Richard Adams book which was written more for teenagers and adults. It's an ecological tale of how men are destroying the earth and (inadvertently it seems) killing innocent wildlife. It's also a very interesting story about how a group of rabbits survive on their own. The animation is excellent--right up there with Walt Disney. The score is great, the script intelligent and the voices used perfectly match the characters. However, as I said, this isn't really for little kids.

The story is dead serious and the only humor is provided by the bird Kehaar (who I personally found very annoying although Zero Mostel DOES have fun with the voice). Also, at the end, it gets very violent and quite bloody. When I saw it in a theatre in 1978 one small kid was in tears by the conclusion. So, use your own judgment but I would never let a small kid see this. This is perfect for teenagers and adults. A 10. 69 of 72 people found this review helpful. Was this review helpful to you? Yes

Question: Who wrote the novel Watership Down?
Answer: Richard Adams