The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Watership Down stands alone as a horizon never reached—a portal into what animation can be, could be: an art form. It fuels the hope for that future. A delicate, violent, savage confection—perfect and sharp, like a diamond knife.”

Guillermo del Toro

Watership Down is a powerful, complicated classic. Its narrative, an odyssey that charts the mixture of safety, peril, and discovery that accompanies leaving one home to find another, exists in a pastoral lineage that includes Bambi, Pom Poko, and Babe. As a lush depiction of the English countryside, one scored by the Academy Award-nominated composer Angela Morley, the film is nearly unparalleled. Equally as strong is its ability to surprise and shock. Here, animated realism is attentive to the ways rabbits—and their everyday experience as prey—can be depicted without recourse to the overwhelmingly cute approach that is most common to anthropomorphism. Which is to say that Watership Down is for many children the most memorable film they will see that doesn’t flinch away from death as a part of life. It is a survival action tale that develops into an espionage plot, balanced by the fleeting sense of freedom that urges the film’s small band of rabbits onward.

“[What] the film shows is indeed very shocking … But the rabbits now seem to possess a charm and simplicity, and perhaps Rosen’s animation style was the closest Britain came to a homegrown Studio Ghibli.”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian