Netflix’s Watership Down Is Not (Really) for Kids—And That’s a Good Thing
Watership Down is a bit of a conundrum. The classic children’s novel by Richard Adams, about a band of rabbits trying to establish a safe home in the English countryside, is a little too subtle and complex for (young) children. And the 1978 animated film is definitely too violent and terrifying for them. (Its fright factor is legendary, right up there with that animated nightmare from the 1980s The Secret of NIMH.) Netflix’s new four-part adaptation, a coproduction with the BBC that starts streaming on December 23, also comes with qualifications. It’s full of furry creatures, though none are all that cute. Digital animation has rendered the rabbits stunningly realistic—mangy, scarred, rain-soaked, and muddy. And while the new series is less scary than that ’78 film, this is still nature red in tooth and claw. Watership is a survival adventure, four hours of peril, and it’s superb. Or so I kept telling my kids, who half-watched the first two episodes with a mixture of confusion (“Daddy is that a bad rabbit or a good rabbit?”) and diving-behind-the-sofa terror.
I proceeded to the end without them. The themes were proving a little tricky to explain anyway. Our hero rabbits, Fiver, Hazel, and Bigwig, and the others are caught between the spoiling forces of human civilization (they escape a burrow before it is decimated by backhoes) and the brutality of nature (birds, fox, dog, cat). The world of rabbits has class friction as well, and sexual politics, and a terrifying dictator rabbit, General Woundwort, who runs a burrow that looks a lot like a concentration camp. The episode titles—“The Journey,” “The Raid,” “The Escape,” “The Siege”—give you an idea of the tone and mood. This is a series full of foreboding, suspense, and bloody battle sequences, all set against a slate gray landscape of misty downs, teeming with predators and studded with barbed wire.
It’s gripping and well-wrought, and all the better thanks to the voice actors, who are among the best British talents working: James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Daniel Kaluuya, Gemma Arterton, and Olivia Colman to name a few. John Boyega as the gruff, battle-minded Bigwig is especially good, and Ben Kingsley makes Woundwort as menacing as any villain on TV. Approach with caution if you have kids (it’s fine for adolescents and up); otherwise, I’d call it a late-2018 surprise, and just the thing for a holiday break binge.
