WATERSHIP DOWN (1978)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *good*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

While I've identified a lot of works as having the "cosmological function" if they dealt with the physical nature of animals, WATERSHIP DOWN is probably the first time I bestowed the "sociological function" on a movie about animals, even if they are animals that can express coherent thoughts and maintain their own mythology.

Because I just re-read the Richard Adams book prior to re-watching the movie, I'm aware of how much story material the movie necessarily had to leave out. Adams' novel is a meandering epic, relating what happens when human-forged catastrophe strikes a natural rabbit warren. Only a small number of male rabbits escape the chaos, led by the resourceful Hazel (voiced by John Hurt). The survivors must first find a new warren on the titular down, and then locate female rabbits (called "does") with which to breed.

The book is more schematic than the movie, in that the fugitive rabbits are presented with two diametrically opposed lapine societies. First the fugitives come across a strangely spacious warren, where the regular occupants seem tense and distracted-- reason being that it's a warren overseen by a human being, who harvests rabbits for his stew-pot. The second society is far from human interference, but it's no less oppressive. A huge brute of a rabbit-chieftain, General Woundwort (Harry Andrews), has turned his warren into a totalitarian regime, and he has a will to induct any free bunnies into his aegis. But the second warren also has a surfeit of does, so Hazel's band can only survive by liberating willing females from Woundwort's tyrannical control.

Almost all of the excisions of book-material by writer-director Martin Rosen are justified, and the film might have been tighter had it left out the human-controlled warren, since Hazel and his allies barely spend any time there. Rosen also logically drops almost all of the mythological stories that the rabbits tell about their world and their culture-heroes, except at the opening, when a narrator describes how the lapine species became the prey of "a thousand enemies," and how rabbits developed an uncanny capacity for speed and cleverness. Only once does an omission by Rosen work badly. He keeps a near-the-end sequence where Hazel is caught and almost killed by a farm-cat. A girl on the farm rescues Hazel and even has her father give the beleaguered bunny a lift to Watership Down. I understand why Rosen left out such a long sequence. But he cuts right at the point where the farm-girl interrupts the cat, and then just has Hazel turn up at the warren without explanation. It would only have taken a few more minutes to depict Hazel escaping the distracted mouser.

Some critics didn't like the pastel watercolors used to depict the English countryside, but I found them necessary to put across the beauty of the natural world, as against the not infrequent violence of predator-attacks. The animators were admirably careful to give each of the rabbits an individual look without descending into Disneyfication. 

In addition to the narrative's main moral of championing the welfare of freedom-loving rabbits (not unlike Tolkien's Hobbits in some ways), Hazel is the epitome of the leader who can think outside the box. The standout example in both book and movie is Hazel's act of  extending charity to a wounded seagull, Keharr (Zero Mostel in his final film-work), so that the bird ends up helping the rabbits in their quest. The movie's Keharr is not even close to being as amusing as the book-version, but he keeps viewers from going on "bunny overload." Though, to be sure, these are bunnies who, at the climax, are seen tearing at each other with teeth and claws. 

WATERSHIP was financially successful but doesn't seem to have had a substantial influence upon the course of animated feature films, which never escaped the long shadow of Walt Disney.