Review of Watership Down (1978) by Lovro H — 25 Sep 2015

Yeah, this wasn't really a children's animated movie. It feels like one at times, but then something dark and disturbing happens, and then all of a sudden, you feel like you're watching an adult animated movie.

I quite liked how that was done. The story is about Fiver, a rabbit, who starts getting visions of how he and his herd are in grave danger. Upon telling everyone about his visions, most of the rabbits decide to follow him and his brother, Hazel, to safety.

But, those who haven't followed him, indeed, get into some quite dangerous situations. From that point on, the rabbits are split up into two groups. The good group who wants to live a life of freedom and safety, and the bad group, Efrafa, who wants to have control over everything, and keep their rabbits as slaves.

It's not really unpredictable what's going to happen next. The good group decides to save all the rabbits being kept in slavery over at Efrafa. I will not spoil the ending, but that ending was seriously brutal and quite depressing.

The characters are all rabbits, with an exception of a cat, a dog and a bird. All of the rabbits are very well developed as chracters and once you switch positions of the rabbits with humans, it almost starts to feel like a war movie.

There's infiltrating in the enemy's base, there's acts of heroism, sacrifices etc. etc. The animation style is really beautiful and reminds me a lot of Ralph Bakshi's cartoons. The voice-acting is very good, though the sound quality was a bit off, but I can't blame them for that, it was made in 1978 after all.

The music is great and quite Disneyesque. All in all, an amazing animated cartoon with a moving and brutal story, filled with well developed characters and a deep meaning to it. I would recommend checking this movie out, and don't think of it as a children's cartoon.