YARRR! YHARRR! YARRRRRR!
In this episode we discussed Watership Down, both the 1972 novel by Richard Adams and the 1978 animated film directed by Martin Rosen.
Our guest this episode is Catherine Lester, whose book on children's horror
'Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema' is available now!
If you want to follow us on twitter we are @stillscaredpod, and our email address is [email protected]. Intro music is by Maki Yamazaki, and you can find her work at her website, and new music on her bandcamp. Outro music is by Joe Kelly, and you can find their music under the name Wendy Miasma on bandcamp. Artwork is by Letty Wilson, find their work at toadlett.com.
Transcript: Watership Down
Ren: Welcome to Still Scared: Talking Children’s Horror, a podcast about creepy, spooky and disturbing children’s books, films and TV. I’m Ren Wednesday, my co-host is Adam Whybray and today we’re joined by special guest Catherine Lester to talk about Watership Down, both the 1972 novel and the 1978 animated film. Enjoy!
(Theme tune plays, fades out, and fades into Bright Eyes by Art Garfunkel)
Ren: Hello, Hi! This is usually the part where I say ‘Hi, Adam’, but we’re leaving that for now, that’s not important, because we have a guest —
Ren: We can also say hi to Adam.
But first — Catherine Lester is a Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham. Her research centres on the intersections of the horror genre and children’s cinema, which is the subject of her monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021). She has also published on a variety of topics relating to children’s media, including a chapter on children’s horror television in the book Global TV Horror, and a chapter on representations of female solidarity and villainy in Frozen in the book Discussing Disney. Her next project is an edited collection focusing on the 1978 animated film Watership Down, to be published by Bloomsbury in late-2022.
Hi Catherine, thank you so much for agreeing to chat with us today!
Cat: Hi! Thank you so much for inviting me to chat about all things scary and childish.
Ren: Yeah, I can’t imagine better credentials for appearing on this podcast than that biography!
Adam: Hi! I have a copy of Catherine’s book here, Horror Films for Children, which I have been thoroughly enjoying. I have to say that your definition of children’s horror is much more academically rigorous than ours!
Cat: Well, I felt like I had to draw some boundaries or feasibly the book could have addressed anything that children watched that was remotely scary, or even unintentionally scary, and that would just be too much! I looked back through the history of what you’ve discussed on the podcast and I’m really impressed actually — there’s just so much there that I’ve never even heard of, which I think just goes to show how much there is in this area but also my need to narrow down the boundaries somewhat.
Adam: Yes, absolutely. It’s funny because when we started the podcast a few years back now, I remember Ren saying ‘I don’t know if we’re going to have enough, it might be quite short-lived’, but that’s been far from the case, we’ve never run out of material. Do you want to give your working definition of children’s horror, or children’s horror films is in your book?
Cat: So, I focus on films which were intended to be for children first of all, and then the question is how do you separate children’s horror films from other films, because obviously if a film is too scary it risks being not suitable for children, and if it’s not scary enough, it risks being considered not horror. So, there’s a really delicate balancing act. So because of that children’s horror tends to overlap quite a lot with other genres, like fantasy and comedy. So I decided to focus on films that seemed to follow a standard horror structure, and dealing with specific themes, like encountering the monstrous, and films that seem to be trying to evoke feelings of fear and disgust. So that would include films like Gremlins which is on the cover of the book and one of my all-time favourites, and films like Paranorman and Coraline by Laika studios, The Witches and all kinds of films.
Adam: A few of which we’ve covered. We’ve done Paranorman and The Witches. With Coraline we’re saving it for our 100th episode, because we’re both big Coraline fans and it’s one of the inspirations for doing the podcast in the first place.
Ren: Yeah, we feel like there needs to be a specific occasion made for Coraline.
Cat: There is a new book that’s just come out about Coraline the film, actually, also from Bloomsbury, edited by someone called Mihaela Mihailova, so you should check that out.
Adam: I know there’s a new collection coming out sometime on The Nightmare Before Christmas which was one of my favourite films as a child, and definitely very formative for me. I find it interesting that you mention it, obviously, but you don’t consider it children’s horror because Jack Skellington is very much an adult character with adult concerns, rather than a child substitute.
Cat: Yeah, again, as part of my way of narrowing it down I decided I wasn’t going to focus on films which are clearly meant to be suitable for children to watch, but where the main character is an adult. I think that you absolutely could say that Nightmare before Christmas is a children’s horror film, but just for the purpose of not having the corpus be too unwieldy, I decided not to include it.
Adam: Yeah, I was wondering if you considered the rabbits of Watership Down to be child substitutes at all, or if they’re too adult in their worries and concerns?
Cat: It’s a good thing you asked that actually, because in the edited chapter that I’ve got coming out about the film, in my own chapter of that I basically read Watership Down as children’s horror, and at least the main cast of good rabbits as substitute children. Of course there are other rabbits in the film that you can’t really read as children, that wouldn’t make sense. General Woundwort is meant to be the big bad adult, a bit like the Grand High Witch in the Witches. General Woundwort and people like the chief rabbit who didn’t believe the other rabbits at the beginning seem to be the substitute adults in comparison to the main group of child-like rabbits.
Adam: Yeah, that’s really interesting and I look forward to reading the chapter. I don’t want you to spoil it too much in advance!
Probably the most provocative statement in the whole book is this defence of the Garbage Pail Kids movie. You might be the only academic to have launched an academic defence of the Garbage Pail Kids movie in existence, I suspect.
There’s an entertaining through-line in the book of ribbing on Roger Ebert, which I really enjoyed, so I don’t know if this was more trying to annoy the ghost of Ebert —
Cat: I do respect Roger Ebert very very much, and I don’t actually know what he said about the Garbage Pail Kids, but he did have some strange things to say about some other children’s horror.
But yes, with the Garbage Pail Kids I absolutely deserve that to be called a contentious statement, because I have watched the Garbage Pail Kids and it’s horrible, it is horrible, although what I found interesting when I dug into the reviews of it was that many of the reviews by adults seemed to take issue with the fact that it was about children who were not doing as they were told.
When really, what’s so bad about the film is the special effects are really bad, the production values are horrible, the script is terrible. But I think there is something clearly potentially pleasurable for children about the fact that it’s about these kids who decide to overthrow the adults who take care of them and it ends with them riding off into the sunset on these quad bikes that they’ve stolen.
So I thought it was worth defending on that basis even thought it’s pretty much indefensible in every other sense.
Adam: Well, I think child viewers as well as adult viewers can take pleasure from these different nooks and crannies in subversive places. And in terms of subversive pleasures I was really caught, partly because you mention it in relation to another academic’s research on the Demon Headmaster, but this idea of ‘Crazy Space’. Can you explain that?
Cat: Oh wow, can I explain that without having it in front of me? Well, crazy space is this concept that was coined by a children’s television academic called Máire Messenger Davies, and she borrows it from the show The Demon Headmaster, in which it’s used to describe the nonsense language that the children use to communicate with each other.
And Messenger Davies basically takes that idea and uses it to describe various children’s television programmes (and we could also apply it to film and other media) and the way that they construct these spaces that are meant to be for children only, and that adults can’t understand or maybe aren’t aware of. I don’t apply that to the Garbage Pail Kids in the book, but I think that you could, because I think that a child could watch it and think that it’s speaking to them on some level that they really like, and resonate with. Whereas for us watching it now we’d be like ‘I don’t understand, this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen’.
Adam: I don’t know if Watership Down really indulges in Crazy Space. It’s obviously quite a gloomy-looking, melancholic kind of film, and it’s structured as a mini-epic. But it’s a really seductive idea, Crazy Space. So, I guess the way to segue into Watership Down is to ask, well, you’ve already kind of answered the question yourself that you do consider Watership Down children’s horror. But was Watership Down produced for a child audience?
Cat: Well, that’s the interesting thing, is that it wasn’t. I think it’s very much an anomalous film to consider children’s horror in that sense, because obviously it’s about rabbits rather than children, even if they are kind of childish in certain ways. But even though now it’s widely received as a children’s film, or even the opposite — when I bring it up a lot of people will say ‘Oh yeah, that’s a terrifying children’s film’ or ‘It’s definitely not for children!’ which seems to apply the label in some way to it anyway. But it wasn’t actually produced with a child audience in mind as a primary audience. The director, Martin Rosen, was very clear about the fact that he didn’t consider it a children’s film in the way that a lot of other animations of its era were, like Disney films.
He was very careful with the marketing of the film as well, to make it clear that it’s a very dark film. I’ve got a poster behind me on the video, which people can’t see but it is the classic poster of Bigwig’s silhouette in the scene where he gets trapped in a snare. Which gets across the sense of violence that’s in the film. The trailer is very up-front about the fact that there is a lot of violence, and that there are elements potentially unsuitable for children in the film. But it was then all these external factors that led to this widespread belief that it was for children, which led to lots of children watching it in the cinema or on TV, and becoming perhaps a bit traumatised by it. Which is the reputation that it’s got.
Adam: So yeah, Ren, do you want to introduce both the book and the film?
Ren: Yeah. So, Watership Down is really one of the titans of children’s horror, in terms of its reputation. Just in terms of sheer numbers of children frightened, it’s a really heavy-hitter. Although of course this reputation is influenced by two aspects that made people underestimate it: being about rabbits, and the film being a cartoon.
Watership Down is a 1972 adventure novel by the English author Richard Adams, which was then made into an animated film released in 1978, and recently a CGI Netflix series in 2018, which we might touch on but isn’t going to be our focus.
As a brief overview, The story follows a group of rabbits who leave their warren after one of their number, Fiver, has a premonition that destruction is coming. They cross the countryside to create a new home for themselves, and along the way they must navigate the dangers of ‘eili’, which is what they call the thousand enemies of rabbits, and navigate the varied cruelties of men, and eventually, a warren that has devolved into a militarised dictatorship. On their journey they are guided by their mythology about Frith who made the world, and El-ahrairah, the resourceful and mischievous Prince of Rabbits.
The driving force of the narrative is the need for rabbit does, as they are all boy rabbits, to continue the life of their community, and it is this need that drives them into the dangerous warren of Efrafa which is led by the memorably tyrannical General Woundwort.
Adam: So as you say it’s an adventure novel, really. And when I mentioned this to my partner Antonia, she said that she didn’t really think of Watership Down as a children’s book, per se, and pointed out that in the ‘70s there was quite a lot of literature that focused on animals and animal characters.
Watership Down is quite clearly focussed on the hero’s journey and recalls legends and myths and Greek epics, with the call to adventure, the characters having to leave their home, and then facing various trials and tribulations, and maybe having to look inwards and face an inner darkness, and eventually reaching some kind of new home or building a new community. Is it something that you watched or read as a kid Ren, or indeed Catherine?
Ren: Well, I’m a total newbie to it. I hadn’t read or seen it at all before preparing for this episode, so I am the blank slate of Watership Down.
Cat: I actually encountered Watership Down for the first time when I was probably about 14. My Dad decided to buy the DVD and we watched it. And then I encountered the novel a few years later, when I was doing a children’s literature course as part of my Master’s degree. And it was actually the novel that I fell head-over-heels in love with. I was really taken by the rich rabbit mythology that it sets out, and it made me realise that rabbits are actually really cool. They’re not just these fluffy little victims, and they can actually be quite aggressive when they need to be. And it’s because of that that I actually have my own two pet rabbits. So I also came to it relatively late, I wasn’t one of those people who watched it as a kid and was traumatised by it. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Adam: For me, like with a lot of films I remember scenes from it. I don’t think I was ever sat down to watch all of it, I think I might have caught some of it on TV. The scene that stays with me is from very early on in the film where they come across a warren that is very sedate, almost too sedate. At first it seems almost utopian, but then the implication is that it’s being managed by some kind of farmer and the rabbits are being farmed and then harvested for their furs or meat. The rabbits they meet have this kind of woozy, lilting, aristocratic way of speaking and speak in these poems and riddles, and that’s a thing that I remember from Watership Down, rather than any overt violence I remember this scene being very strange and off-putting and not really knowing what to make of it.
Cat: I think for a film that is about rabbits in the countryside it has some very striking non-naturalistic imagery, peppered around what is very accurate and realistic landscapes. And that’s one of them, because the warren is painted in these purple and orange colours, which is meant to mark it out as strange and not trustworhty. It’s a very memorable part of the film.
Ren: Yeah, that was one of the bits I was going to bring up, because I think a lot of people think of the most memorably violent bits as the horror of Watership Down, but this incident with the warren of the snares, (or Cowslip’s warren) is very creepy. It has this slow creeping horror.
So this is quite soon after the rabbits leave their home warren, and they come across a very large, healthy-looking rabbit called Cowslip who welcomes the strangers to his warren without any trace of wariness. He’s just like ‘Yes, come to my warren’.
(Clip from Watership Down.
One of the main rabbits: ‘This is rather a big warren’
Cowslip: ‘Yes, help yourself to flayra. There are fresh roots here daily, them man throws it out.
Main rabbit: ‘Man? What man?’)
They go there but Hazel notices that whenever he tries to start a sentence with ‘where’, Cowslip changes the subject. They’re not allowed to ask any questions. It’s quite a slow build of horror.
Cat: And then culminates in Bigwig being trapped, so it really leads up to this explosion of violence even though what comes before is very subdued.
Adam: Yes, Bigwig trapped in the snare is the first moment of graphic violence in the film. And probably one of the most upsetting as it’s quite protracted. Bigwig is choking with the wire around his neck and the other rabbits are trying to save him, although Cowslip stops the rabbits from going out by basically saying ‘what will be will be’ and they shouldn’t interfere.
Ren: Because that’s the price of their comfortable life, that these rabbits have come to accept that a number of them will die in snares and they never mention the ones who have gone.
Cat: It’s very dystopian. It’s a concept that reminds me of Logan’s Run. Is that the one where you have a really nice life but you only get to live up to the age of 30 and then you get killed.
Adam: Yes! Or almost Brave New World, with these characters who are very sedate and have everything they could wish for, but don’t have any freedom. So it does feel like a little meditation on freedom and what these rabbits have sacrificed to have their comfortable lifestyle.
So shall we introduce some of these characters? There’s Bigwig —
Cat: Bigwig’s my favourite.
Ren: Bigwig’s great. So, the ensemble cast of rabbits is fairly large but for the original group from the home warren we have Fiver, who had the vision, Hazel, who is designated chief rabbit of their group, Bigwig, the pugnacious fighter rabbit, Blackberry, a particularly clever rabbit and Pipkin, a small rabbit who does his best. And then they get joined by more characters as they go along. They pick up Strawberry from this snared warren who decides to leave as the group are running away after rescuing Bigwig from the snare, and they also get a couple more survivors from their original home warren, which as it turns out was destroyed by men and diggers.
Adam: In the new Netflix version it’s made very clear that it’s a housing development, but in both versions you have this rather hellish scene of the warren being filled in, and the rabbits being suffocated to death with gasses and soil. Which is a very upsetting scene in both versions.
Ren: And from that we get Holly, who’s one of the Owsla —
Adam: — the rabbit guard?
Ren: Rabbit police? Yeah. And his court jester Bluebell who I find quite a peculiar character.
Cat: And they’re joined by a seagull, of course, the wonderful Kehar.
(Clip from Watership Down: Kehar: YARRR! YHAAR! YARRRRR!)
Cat: I love the slightly antagonistic relationship between Kehar and Bigwig. Especially in the film, and I would gladly watch a buddy film about Kehar and Bigwig.
Ren: Yes, because Hazel has the idea that they need all the allies they can get. So he saves a mouse that’s going to be killed, and he says ‘Well, a mouse could help us later in some way’, and then they find Kehar who’s been injured and separated from the rest of his flock of gulls who are going to the ocean, or the ‘Big Water’ as he calls it. They’re only able to communicate in a kind of pidgin language, because the rabbits speak Lapine, and one of the interesting aspects of the book and film is that we get words of Lapine scattered throughout. For example, words for predators like a lendril being a badger.
Cat: Yes, when the film was being released for critics to review it, critics received a glossary of all of those words. Which is really interesting, because the viewers didn’t get the benefit of that, and I don’t really think that you need it. Because the book kind of does translate for you, but the film doesn’t bother and it doesn’t really need to because you can work it out from context.
Adam: It’s definitely something that adds to the richness of the book and the film. Reading the book, I’m not a big Tolkien fan to be honest, but it did remind me of Tolkien. Partly because of the epic structure but also because of the world-building, and the care that’s put into building up the mythology and the language, and the sense you get that you’re seeing glimpses of what is a much wider universe. Reading the book you definitely get the sense, rightly or wrongly, I don’t know, that Richard Adams had a sense of this whole universe in his head.
Ren: So Cat, your upcoming book is specifically about the 1978 film. What kind of approaches are you taking with that?
Cat: Well, it’s an edited collection so it’s made up of about 16 chapters. One of them’s written by me, and others are written by various experts in animation and related areas. And I’ve also written the introduction to the book. So it covers a wide range of things and approaches it from lots of different vantage points.
So obviously my approach is thinking about it as a children’s horror film, but we’ve got chapters on the political allegory of the film, chapters on its production — including a chapter co-written by two brothers whose father was actually an animator on the film, Arthur Humberstone. So they had access to all these amazing archival materials and have pieced together a narrative of his contributions to the film. So hopefully when the book comes out some of the materials will be printed that won’t have been seem by most people before, which is exciting.
There’s also chapters on the music, obviously when you think of Watership Down music you think about the song Bright Eyes, but the two chapters in the book actually focus on the score by Angela Morley and the way that it is evokes horror and other kinds of emotions. Yeah, loads of chapters on various themes and exciting things that the film was doing.
And just as a whole really I wanted to draw more attention to this amazing film, and I was surprised that not very much had been written on it in an academic context. Even though it gets written about quite a lot in the press and on social media. Particularly when it’s broadcast on TV. A few years ago it was broadcast on Easter Sunday and got a bit of a backlash, because people were like ‘What do you think you’re doing, exposing children to this on Easter Sunday, you sadists!’ which I thought was hilarious.
So with the book I particularly wanted to put Watership Down in its context. Because as I said before, it wasn’t really meant to be for children, but for various reasons, like the fact that it is animated and about rabbits, and the fact that the BBFC gave it a U certificate, which still seems completely wild —
Adam: Do you know any reasons for that? Because the BBFC are normally known, historically, for going in the other direction. Not giving a film that has quite a lot of bloody violence a U. That seems quite uncharacteristic.
Cat: Well, I can actually read you some of their report, which is online on their website. It says: "Animation removes the realistic gory horror in the occasional scenes of violence and bloodshed, and we felt that, while the film may move children emotionally during the film's duration, it could not seriously trouble them once the spell of the story is broken, and that a U certificate was therefore quite appropriate."
And the film still has a U certificate. But that is part of the reason that putting the film in context is important. Because it does seem really misguided that they gave it that certificate, but at the time, in 1978, the BBFC didn’t have as many ratings as they do know. So they basically had the option to give it a U, and potentially make it accessible to all children, or to give it a more restrictive rating. They didn’t have the 15 at the time, but it would have been basically the equivalent of that and then no children would have been able to see it.
So I think they were weighing up their options and saying ‘Well, we do think that some children will enjoy this’, so they went for the more open approach.
Adam: Thanks, that does help explain the reasoning behind it.
Cat: Although the fact that it still has a U certificate when it could be given a PG or a 12 is a bit more questionable!
Adam: In terms of animation, it’s my understanding that the British animation industry has always existed in quite localised areas and maybe in fits and starts, and while we might think of individual animators and little studios, particularly Ardmann from the late ‘80s, but I can’t think of many British animations. Apart from Animal Farm which I was definitely show in school, and again doesn’t really feel like a cartoon for children. I don’t know if there’s much in the book about the British animation industry and where Watership Down sits within that.
Cat: That’s a good question, actually. Apart from Watership Down I’m by no means an expert on animation more generally. But it is interesting that the film came out at a point in animation history where Disney was kind of waning a bit, the studio was really struggling in the animation department. Some of those films are very fondly remembered now, films like Robin Hood and the Aristocats, but at the time it was seen as quite a low point for Disney. So you had films like Watership Down, as well as films from all over the world that were emerging as these alternative, adult animations. Films like Fantastic Planet, which was a surreal French animation. You had the Lord of the Rings animated film by Ralph Bakshi, which came out very close to Watership Down so they were compared a lot in the press.
Adam: Yeah, visually it has some similarities. In terms of the green and brown colour palette, and things looking a bit muted and dismal at times, but also pretty at the same time.
Cat: Yeah, and you also had the Yellow Submarine film, the Beatles film which would have been the late ‘60s. So there was this really interesting time where it seemed like there was an opportunity for animation outside of the Disney studio and outside of America, which I don’t think really happened, and Disney recovered around the late ‘80s and then we had the Disney renaissance. But because of the prominence of the Disney studio throughout the whole of the twentieth century and beyond, any other animation that’s outside of the Hollywood has to provide an alternative in some way. And British animation like Ardmann is good at that. It’s very clearly doing something distinct that mainstream American animation isn’t doing. The Laika studios films like Paranorman and Coraline are also doing that. I don’t know if that really answered your question about British animation specifically!
Adam: I think you’re right about the context after Walt Disney’s death and the Disney studio perhaps putting money into live action —
Cat: — And the theme parks.
Adam: Yeah. My own academic writing has been on Czech animation. And certainly in the ‘60s that’s when we see the really big, memorable full-length animations do well at film festivals and on the world stage, and I think that is partly because Disney weren’t on the most stable footing at that point.
I think it’s worth saying that these character designs are very non-Disney. Apart from perhaps later Fox and the Hound, because certainly when the Fox and the Hound are adults they’re less cutsey. But certainly these rabbits, I don’t know — Ren, Catherine, do you think these rabbits are cute, in the film?
Cat: I find all rabbits cute, so I think I’m biased maybe. Ren, what do you think?
Ren: I mean, some of them are cute. They have quite big eyes when they’re scared.
Cat: Certainly if you were to put Thumper from Bambi next to any of the rabbits in Watership Down you would be able to see a clear difference in the level of cuteness.
Although it is interesting that the animator, Phil Duncan, who animated Thumper in Bambi, did work on Watership Down. And he was specifically head-hunted because they thought he was really good at animating rabbits. But they must have directed him to go more realistic, rather than the hyper-cute aesthetic that Thumper has.
Adam: Because facially, the rabbits are a little anthropomophised but to me most of the time they either look cross or scared. They either have a bit of a furrowed brow and look a bit argumentative, or they look worried and anxious. Which I think adds to the atmosphere of the film — and the book. The book doesn’t really let up. I don’t know how you found reading it, Ren but I found it quite an anxious read. Because it is one thing after another, and they are pursued and set upon.
Ren: I think the thing that the book has is the storytelling interludes — with Dandelion the storyteller telling the stories of El-ahriarah. Which are — well, I was going to say light relief, but some of them actually pretty dark, when you get to the part about the Black Rabbit of Inle.
Adam: Did you want to read any of that?
Ren: The only passage that I had down was about Blackavar.
Adam: Is that for Texture of the Week?
Ren: No, but shall we do Texture of the Week?
Adam: Okay, let’s do that. We’re not necessarily going to force you to sing, Cat, but do you want to try and do Texture of the Week to the tune of Bright Eyes, Ren?
Adam: sings Texture of the Week to the tune of Bright eyes
Adam: When I think of Bright Eyes, I always think — have both of you seen the League of Gentlemen?
Adam: Have you seen it, Cat?
Cat: Yes, but I have no idea where this could be going!
Adam: Oh, okay! Well, in the League of Gentlemen there’s this horrible character played by Steve Pemberton called Pop, who is this awful slimy landlord, and there’s this whole thing where he talks really emotionally about Watership Down and how he used to play it for his sons. And he starts singing Bright Eyes, but he does it in this awful husky voice: (Adam imitates in a horrible husky voice) ‘Bright eyes! Burning like fire!’.
(Clip from The League of Gentlemen: ’Bright eyes! Burning like fire! The little rabbits are so brave, there’s so many obstacles for them to overcome’)
So that’s kind of ruined the song for me personally. Because it’s a lovely song and Art Garfunkel sings it beautifully.
Ren: Another thing ruined by 90s British comedy!
Ren: I’ll got first because I’ve got this hairbrush that I’m putting up to the mic, because mine is just a line from the book: ‘And once they heard a corncrake calling as it crept among the long grass of a path verge. (It makes a sound like a human fingernail drawn down the teeth of a comb.)’ (Ren draws their finger down the spines of the hairbrush).
Ren: I just like that. I thought it was quite nice.
Adam: Cat, did you chose a texture?
Cat: I did, but I might not have interpreted Texture of the Week quite as literally.
Adam: That’s fine, we’ve had ideological textures in the past!
Cat: Okay, well I was just trying to think of stuff that I’ve watched recently which has really stuck with me, and this is something completely different from Watership Down or Children’s horror, but I recently watched the new Céline Sciamma film Petit Maman, which landed on the streaming service Mubi last week. And I liked it so much I watched it again the very next day.
Adam: And it is a child protagonist? It’s not a children’s film but it has a child protagonist?
Cat: I think you could say that it is a children’s film, children could watch it and enjoy it. Basically it’s about a young girl who manages to go back and time and meet her own mother when she’s the same age. So they’re both supposed to be about 8. And they basically have this really lovely time together, fleetingly, for a few days. Which is a description that sounds so simplistic, and it is, but the film is so laden with melancholy but also joy — it’s just really lovely. I was trying to think if there was a specific moment I could talk about for Texture of the Week, but really I think it’s that the tone of the film is very quiet, which is very similar to Sciamma’s previous film Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is a film in which music is very important but it doesn’t have a score, so there’s lots of these moments of silence. And Petit Maman is very similar. I don’t think I’m doing it justice but everyone should watch it as soon as possible.
Adam: And you said it’s on Mubi at the moment?
Cat: It is, and it’s only about 74 minutes long. It’s just this perfect little gem.
Adam: It is on my watch list on Mubi, so I will make an effort to watch that now. It sounds like one that I could watch with my step-daughter. And sounds like a good length as well.
So for my texture I was going to go with General Woundwort’s face, which is — not rumpled exactly, but it looks kind of scarred and scraggly and it’s really textured. You can really imagine, maybe not scruffling this rabbit’s face because he’d probably bite your hand off — but he’s definitely the fleshiest of all the rabbits in the film.
(Clip from Watership Down of General Woundwort: ‘You tell your chief Bigwig that if he and Hyzenflay and the others aren’t waiting outside when I come for them, I’ll tear out every throat in the place!’)
Ren: One of the screenshots that seems to get shown a lot is of General Woundwort at the end, in the tunnel, bearing down on the rabbits, bleeding from various parts of his face with mismatched eyes. Quite an imposing sight. And I should probably explain a little more of the plot in case people are completely lost.
So, as I said they want to get rabbit does so Kehaar the gull tells them that there is a warren nearby, Hazel sends a small group led by Holly to scout them out and see if any does will return with them. But they come back traumatised and injured, and saying that this warren isn’t a normal warren — it’s a highly militarised regime where all of the rabbits have their own mark, which is a literal mark, a scar on their body to show which regiment they belong to, and they’re only allowed to go out and eat at certain times, and they’re all controlled by the Owsla. The warren’s called Efrafra and they send out patrols to scout out the surrounding area.
So they barely manage to escape from Efrafa, but Holly does come back with the news that there are does there who want to leave, but they’re not allowed to. Hazel thinks this is still the best chance to get does, so they come up with a plan where Bigwig is going to say that he wants to join Efrafa, which is quite a good little plan because he goes to General Woundwort and says that he wants join Efrafa and General Woundwort is sort of like ‘what? why?’ but he can’t say why —
Adam: — He’s probably quite touched, he’s probably like ‘Aw, no-one’s ever said that before!’
Ren: So Bigwig becomes an officer and is second-in-command in a mark, and there he finds the doe Hyzenflay who was the leader of the group who wanted to leave the warren and with the help of Kehar they manage to escape. But while they’re there he decides that they’re going to bring Blackavar with them, who is a rabbit who tried to escape and was horribly punished as a result. So I’m just going to read the description of where Bigwig comes across Blackavar:
‘This rabbit had very dark fur—almost black. But this was not the most remarkable thing about him. He was dreadfully mutilated. His ears were nothing but shapeless shreds, ragged at the edges, seamed with ill-knit scars and beaded here and there with lumps of proud, bare flesh. One eyelid was misshapen and closed askew. Despite the cool, exciting air of the July evening, he seemed apathetic and torpid. He kept his gaze fixed on the ground and blinked continually. After a time he lowered his head and rubbed his nose on his forepaws in a listless manner. Then he scratched his neck and settled down in his former drooping position.
Bigwig, his warm, impulsive nature stirred by curiosity and pity, went across the run. “Who are you?” he asked. “My name is Blackavar, sir,” replied the rabbit. He did not look up and spoke without expression, as though he had answered this question many times before. “Are you going to silflay?” said Bigwig. No doubt, he thought, this was some hero of the warren, wounded in a great fight and now infirm, whose past services merited an honorable escort when he went out. “No, sir,” answered the rabbit. “Why ever not?” said Bigwig. “It’s a lovely evening.” “I don’t silflay at this time, sir.” “Then why are you here?” asked Bigwig, with his usual directness. “The Mark that has the evening silflay, sir,” began the rabbit. “The Mark that has—they come—I—” He hesitated and fell silent.
One of the Owslafa spoke. “Get on with it,” he said. “I come here for the Mark to see me,” said the rabbit in his low, drained voice. “Every Mark should see how I have been punished as I deserve for my treachery in trying to leave the warren. The Council were merciful—the Council were merciful—the Council—I can’t remember it, sir, I really can’t,” he burst out, turning to the sentry who had spoken. “I can’t seem to remember anything.”
Adam: That’s quite harrowing.
Adam: But they do escape.
Cat: They do escape and I think Blackavar survives — it’s been a while since I’ve actually read the novel in full, but in the film, sadly, he does not. And I think of all the deaths in the film, and there are a lot, he probably has the most horrific one. Because he’s torn apart by either Woundwort or one of the other evil rabbits and you get this shot of these great gouges in his side and all of this blood pouring out, and it’s really quite gruesome.
Adam: The film really escalates in terms of its violence. The last third is definitely the most violent and bloody. I was watching it with my step-daughter Matt and she was like ‘I thought this had a reputation for being violent!’ during the first half, ‘This is nothing’ and by the end was like, ‘Okay, that was a bit much’. I think particularly when the dog starts — part of their plan is to let this dog loose, the dog is probably having a great time of it, not so much fun for the rabbits.
Ren: Because the rabbits make it back from Efrafra to the warren, but they are followed. In the film this happens immediately, in the book there’s a bit of a gap. But they are trying to turn quite a long book into quite a short film and I think they did a very good job of it. So there’s this final climatic scene, and Bigwig memorably buries himself in the Earth to ambush General Woundwort as he’s coming down the tunnel.
Adam: I think this concision is definitely to the benefit of the film, because we mentioned the recent BBC adaptation that you can watch on Netflix. It’s much longer than the film, I think there are four episodes and they’re each 45-50 minutes long, and to be honest, I think in the book there’s a fair amount of rabbit politicking, the rabbits discuss their plans a fair but. The film is a bit choppier, it’s a bit more episodic but I think that works really well for the film.
Personally I found the BBC adaptation a little bit boring, if I’m honest. It does drag a little bit. Which is a shame because it does have a star-studded cast who do well with the voice acting. I’ve recently watched The Detectorists, so I was happy to hear Mackenzie Crook as one of the rabbits. But it is CGI, and I’ve probably talked about my love of stop-motion on the podcast before, and generally having less time for CGI. I do think some of Pixar’s films are great, and I have a lot of time for Moana, so I do think that CGI can work if it fits the material, here I guess the budget isn’t quite what you’d expect for a pixar production — it’s a BBC budget, and the animation does look a bit stark, a bit lifeless—
Cat: — a bit dated, as well. When it was broadcast lots of the reactions on social media were ‘am I watching a cutscene from a PS2 game?’ which is maybe a bit harsh, but understandable. Because considering the film does a lot of the time have a muted colour palette, but it does have some really beautiful and stark and colourful imagery, particularly in some of the more surreal sections. But the series, in trying to go for an even more realistic aesthetic just ends up looking really drab and plain.
Adam: That’s how I felt about the so-called live action Disney remake of the Lion King. And I think it speaks to how animation, as a medium, at its most expressive can transform the world, and I think the original film uses abstraction really well, and the bits that stick in the mind, I’m thinking particularly of the Bright Eyes sequence, it’s really pared down and minimal, you’ve basically just got these two black silhouettes dancing about on the screen with minimal background and it’s very abstracted, and yet that’s very evocative and stays in the mind a lot better than the attempt at a more photo-realistic style, which is again limited by the budget, but I think even if it were more high-budget, I still think that the more abstract style and stylisation creates a much more interesting style, and a more dreamlike style than the realism.
Cat: And I think a great missed opportunity with the series is that it does open with this really stunning, similar to the film it opens with this prologue about the sun god Frith, which is the rabbit religion, how he created the world and all the animals, and it’s done in this really beautiful, shadow-puppet style, it’s completely gorgeous, and then it drops that and doesn’t come back to it at all. And I think it’s a shame not only that they didn’t continue with that more expressionist style, but also that they didn’t take the opportunity to include more of those interludes. Because in the novel you have lots more of those stories about El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inle which really builds out the rabbit mythology. Which you can’t include in the film, it’s understandable that they didn’t try to squeeze those in, but the series had the opportunity to do that, because it was longer form, and I think it’s a real shame that they didn’t take that opportunity.
Adam: Yeah, absolutely. I think it is a bit of a missed opportunity. But as with re-makes, they don’t efface the originals. If you watch the Netflix one and find it lacking, you can always go back to Rosen’s original.
Cat: There was also a TV series made in 1999 that was traditional animation and broadcast on CITV. It does have its fans although it’s not as well-know as the film. So if people are wanting to see a more long-form version of Watership Down that isn’t as ugly as the Netflix/BBC series, they could look at that, although because it was made for CITV it does strip away all the violent content from the novel.
Adam: Visually it looks quite similar to The Animals of Farthing Wood, which was a show that I grew up with and that is often talked about in the same breath as Watership Down. And surely a show influenced by Watership Down. It has a much wider cast of characters, but starts with a similar inciting incident — a housing development or something getting built, and the animals having to leave —
Ren: — A hedgehog gets run over by a truck, it was very upsetting.
Adam: Yeah, so in some ways, it may not be as graphically violent but in terms of the variety of deaths there are more in The Animals of Farthing Wood.
(The Animals of Farthing Wood theme tune plays in the background)
I think maybe one of the birds, perhaps a kestrel ends up in a cement mixer? Which is pretty upsetting.
Cat: Oh my god! Bloody hell.
Adam: So Animals of Farthing Wood is another one that is known for its levels of violence that unsuspecting children were troubled by.
Ren: Friend of the pod Ava insisted that when we talk about Watership Down that I mention the Watership Down-themed crust punk band Fall of Efrafa, that her friend George was the drummer in. Who created a triology of Watership Down-themed concept albums called Owsla, Elil and Inle in the mid-late 2000s.
Ren: So if you want to enjoy Watership Down in a completely different genre, there is that option.
Adam: And I know that Steve Jackson games released quite early a Watership Down tabletop role-playing game, perhaps in the 80s. So it’s had a long legacy in many ways.
Cat: It’s been adapted to theatre and radio as well, I believe.
Adam: I can really imagine it working well on stage, actually. You could really push the abstraction there.
And then Rosen went on to direct another film that really isn’t for children, which is Plague Dogs. Which really doubles down on the misery in Watership Down. Plague Dogs is a much more upsetting, more downbeat film. I historically have not been very keen on dogs, though I have been living with dogs now for two years, and I have started to consider them my dogs as well now, Olive and Eddy, and I have come to love them. Olive, almost despite herself, she’s a poodle cross and exhibits all the wit and intelligence and irritating qualities that you would associate with poodles. But when I watched Plague Dogs I wasn’t a dog person at all, and yet it made me cry. I really found it quite crushing. The dogs in that were on the run, they’d been subject to vivisection, and the two dogs are trying to survive.
Cat: I actually only watched Plague Dogs for the first time and probably the last time, a few months ago. I thought I would be prepared for it because of Watership Down, but I was not. It’s relentlessly bleak. A very skilful film, for what it’s trying to do, but not something I want to subject myself to ever again.
Adam: Yeah, if you imagine Lars von Trier or someone, or Michael Haneke making an animation about animals, that’s what it’s like. It’s quite astonishingly bleak.
Cat: Yeah, and for all the crap that Watership Down gets for being violent, it is at least an optimistic film and ends in a way that’s uplifting. And does have moments of comedy, for example with Kehaar the seagull that helps to give it a bit of a tonal balance, but with Plague Dogs it’s just misery from beginning to end.
Adam: It’s relentless, it really is. You haven’t seen it, have you Ren?
Adam: I wouldn’t, if I’m honest! I don’t think you’d get on with it. I will say this — I have shown my step-kids, what’s the really miserable Ghibli film with the kids?
Cat: Grave of the Fireflies
Adam: Yeah, I have shown my step-kids Grave of the Fireflies, I will say that my ten-year old step-son wasn’t bothered by it at all, and just commented on all the logistical mistakes they were making in terms of staying alive, but that’s George. I would never show them Plague Dogs, there is no way. So this is a warning to anyone who listens to this and is like, ‘Ooh, maybe I’ll watch Plague Dogs’, tread lightly! It’s a heavy watch.
And the only other thing I wanted to mention that I think Watership Down might have influenced is the very long-running series Warrior Cats, that I know a lot about from my step-daughter who is a life-long fan. And Warrior Cats is quite similar in terms of the cat politics, and cats under threat, but it doubles down on the religious themes a lot more. The religion and mythology in Warrior Cats is very deep and complicated, so that was Matt’s observation in watching Watership Down, that they don’t go into the religion very much. She felt that it was quite lightly sketched.
Cat: I’ve never heard of Warrior Cats but I like cats, and I like Watership Down, so it seems like something I would enjoy!
Adam: It’s a very long-running young adult book series. It probably started at just the point where you would have been just too old for it. It’s very big in the Netherlands, actually. When I was in Martstrikt there were posters up for the audiobook of it at busstops. I don’t think it’s so well-known in Britain, but in America and parts of Europe it’s very big. We might cover it at some point, it certainly gets very violent, as the name would imply.
Are there any last thoughts on Watership Down?
Cat: Oh gosh, I have so many.
Ren: We’ve only had about an hour to talk about it!
Cat: One of the things I wanted to highlight that I haven’t had a chance to talk about yet is that when it was released the critical reception was actually not that great. It tends to be either thought of now as either traumatising, but respected as a work of art, with some people who are very fond of it but when it came out the critical reception was very mixed. Which was something I was surprised to find when I went digging and finding those contemporary reviews. And I found that really interesting and shows us that something like Rotten Tomatoes is pretty useless, because they would have you think that it’s very well-respected. Which it is now, but Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t have any of those older historical reviews. There’s one in particular that I kind of want to read out just because it’s so mean.
It was a dual review of Watership Down and The Lord of the Rings, by an animation historian called Micheal Barrier, and he said that he found Watership Down to be ‘very stupid’, and that there was ‘no sign that there was any intelligence involved in making the film’ and that it was ‘so unremarkable that it was almost as if Watership Down had never been released at all’.
Cat: I think the film ended up proving him wrong, because it is now very well remembered and loved by lots of people.
Adam: And on that bombshell!
Ren: Yes. Thank you so much Cat for joining us to talk about Watership Down, and children’s horror in general, it’s been really great!
Adam: And can you remind us about your books - So, Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema is already out, and I definitely recommend it, it’s a great read. It covers a lot of real classics of the genre which I think you’ve done great work in arguing for as a genre. And when’s the book on Watership Down coming out?
Cat: As far as I know it’s set for release in September of this year, but publishing deadlines can move about so who knows, but hopefully it won’t be too long.
Right, stay safe creepy kids and don’t watch plague dogs! Just don’t do it to yourself.
