‘I’ve just taken on a novel about rabbits, one of them with extra-sensory perception. Do you think I’m mad?’ [The publisher Rex Collings, writing to a colleague, after accepting Richard Adams’s debut novel ‘Watership Down’, previously turned down by seven major publishers]
No one who, like me, watched ‘Watership Down’ as a child could ever forget it. It leaves an indelible mark. It is disturbing and haunting and not suitable for children at all. Disney, it’s not!
I’m talking of the 1978 animation, of course, which captures the spirit of Richard Adams’s novel so perfectly that I struggle to understand why later adaptations were ever made.
In the great tradition of British children’s literature, like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ and ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Watership Down’ started as tales recounted by Adams to amuse his young daughters on long car journeys. It was they who urged him to turn it into a book. Yet, what makes Adams’s novel unique is his transposition of his experiences in the Battle of Arnhem in 1944 onto the fragile world of a rabbits’ warren buried deep in the English countryside.
Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig…
Even the names of the rabbits have a kind Proustian power of reminiscence, taking me back to childhood. I’m sitting again, on the floor in front of the television – unable to look and unable to look away.
Here is a short clip of the Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro talking of his first encounter with this classic animation, followed by the trailer:
