Watership Down, review: a smart take on a classic tale, hindered by soulless CGI
From Children of the Stones to The Black Hole, children’s television and cinema of the late Seventies seemed geared towards giving its audience nightmares. In 2016, the enduring power of one cornerstone was underlined thanks to Channel 5’s eccentric decision to air Martin Rosen’s 1978 adaptation of Richard Adams’s 1972 novel Watership Down, in which bunnies are bloodily massacred, on Easter Sunday afternoon. The reaction was visceral enough to go viral, yet many came to the defence of the film for its even-handed acknowledgement of both the pastoral beauty and brutal horrors of the natural world; even Springwatch gets a bit gnarly sometimes.
Clearly, it still provoked strong reactions – so why bother to remake Watership Down (BBC One, Saturday and Sunday), toned down for modern sensibilities and more sensibly scheduled after bedtime for the very young? Tom Bidwell’s sharp, thoughtful adaptation was above all a reminder of the rousing adventure yarn at its heart, as sensible Hazel (James McAvoy) and his brother Fiver (Nicholas Hoult), the latter plagued by visions of the imminent destruction of their Sandleford Warren, led a small band of rabbits in search of a safe haven from humans, predators and rival colonies including the grim dictatorship of General Woundwort (Ben Kingsley).
The themes of environmentalism (“Where there are humans, there is death”) and anti-fascism were unmistakable without being bludgeoned home, and the decision to excise the majority of Adams’s often creaky lapine fables such as ‘Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog’, was wise.
The dialogue creaked occasionally, especially during the thankfully brief romantic interludes, while Hazel’s brush with death courtesy of a farmer’s bullet left me, to my horror, rather missing Art Garfunkel’s mawkish Bright Eyes, for which Sam Smith’s theme tune was an anaemic substitute. And giving the unapologetically villainous General Woundwort a vaguely sympathetic backstory (he saw his parents and warren butchered by a fox) was silly.
After a striking opening of shadow puppetry laying out the origins and foundational folklore of rabbits, the visuals sacrificed the lushness, charm and personality of hand-drawn animation for the technical definition, forensic detail and oddly alienating characterisation of CGI; an effect familiar from director Noam Murro’s previous work, soulless smash-em-up 300: Rise of an Empire. This was dark in tone and palette, but not perhaps as unsettlingly strange as it needed to be during the visit to Cowslip’s (Rory Kinnear) warren, maintained by humans in exchange for the occasional cull. The sequence, too, when Holly (Freddie Fox) related the destruction of Sandleford by diggers was less harrowing nightmare than anthropomorphic disaster movie. But Woundwort’s warren Efrafa, lurking beneath a derelict factory, was superbly realised, and each quivering hair on every rabbit was visible.
Even the most gifted illustrator would struggle to make each one of 27 speaking rabbits truly visually distinct, and a certain deadness behind the eyes was compensated for in the exemplary voice casting. While McAvoy and Hoult could never have hoped to outgun John Hurt and Richard Briers in the same roles, John Boyega lent Bigwig heft and dignity, Jason Watkins and Craig Parkinson brought pinched menace to their Efrafan lieutenants and Peter Capaldi was entertainingly grumpy as the gull Kehaar. The beefed-up female parts drew Olivia Colman and Gemma Arterton among others, while even the minor parts were superbly cast, with Rosamund Pike and Tom Wilkinson lending personality and gravitas to the very few lines they had. Above all, Kingsley was a chilling Woundwort, his presence giving every scene a jolt of malicious energy.
The pacing would have perhaps been better matched to the original intention of airing it in four shorter episodes, rather than two longer ones, yet this decision lent an epic quality and it built slowly to a genuinely stirring climax. And yes, there was less blood than Rosen’s film, but also more violence. Whether this is more damaging for young psyches is something for sociologists to debate. Nevertheless, there was much to admire here as it reestablished Watership Down as one of the great modern folk tales and, whether Adams likes it or not, a potent parable to boot. If it opens up a new generation to the work – especially worldwide, given the involvement of Netflix – then this was a job worth doing.