Watership Down follows the journey of a group of rabbits as they travel from their warren just prior to its destruction all the way to them finding and fighting for their home.
For the uninitiated, Watership Down (2018) is the Netflix adaptation of the novel of the same name by Richard Adams, written in 1972. There have been a few iterations, from the animated film of 1978 to the animated series that ran from 1999 to 2001.
First off, I have not read the book, nor have I watched any other iteration of the show; therefore, my review is based solely on the quality of the miniseries.
As such, let’s get the good out of the way, first. The Netflix adaptation comes with a powerhouse voice cast, with James McAvoy, Gemma Arterton, Peter Capaldi, Daniel Kaluuya, Ben Kingsley, and John Boyega, to name a few. The story is meant for children, but does not shy away from the darkness of the world, even if they are in the form of rabbits and other animals. It tells an interesting story of trust, liberty, and love, and what it means to fight for something you believe in.
That’s the good. The bad is that, if you don’t like the way Watership Down looks in its first five minutes, you’re not going to want to watch it. Watership Down looks like something out of a computer game in the early 2000s, with choppy animation, poor expressions, and even poorer character design.
Apart from a few characters, namely Bigwig, Bluebell, and sometimes Fiver, I often struggled to tell the characters apart, which leads me to my next issue: the characters.
The characters are not particularly deep or complex; something that is to be expected from source material (for children) from the 70s. The good bunnies are good because they fight for good things, and the bad bunnies are bad because they’re evil and oppressive for no other reason than to be so. The baddest bunny is General Woundwort, voiced by Ben Kingsley, a big scary hulk of a rabbit that has his own warren and runs it as a prison for… reasons. Reasons that don’t need to be explained because he’s the bad guy. That’s what bad bunnies do. The female bunnies exist as one of few options: diggers, mates, or oppressed. This is made all the more ironic when you realise that rabbits are actually matriarchies, and the founding of a new warren is often done by young, dissatisfied does, rather than bucks.
However, it is that Old English mentality that is the lifeblood of Watership Down, a Victorian ( or World War I–era, at the very least) premise of brotherhood above all, where the men go charging into battle while the women swoon and pray for their speedy return.
This is also contradicted by the lead rabbit, Hazel, in a few scenes towards the end where, when all hope seems lost, he refuses to leave his post in the hopes that his lady love, Clover, will return, giving no thought at all to his brother-in-arms, Bigwig, also holed up/detained within the same area. The characters themselves are fairly one-note. Hazel is the leader, Bigwig is the brawn, Bluebell is the soft one, and so on and so forth.
Setting all this aside, Watership Down does manage to keep things interesting and it never felt dull, or like it was progressing too slowly. It sets out to tell a story, and a story it does tell, which is nice to hear, but not necessarily nice to see.
Once again, I will praise the voice cast, without whom this series would be abysmal. The score is passable and doesn’t particularly stand out against everything else. If you love the book, stick with it. If you’re curious to try something new, well, there’s no harm in Watership Down if you can stomach the CGI.
The Average Viewer 