Watership Down

A beautiful, noble work, as carefully animated, edited, and acted as any I know. Without the epigraphs from Aeschylus and Shakespeare, and the dedicated, extraneous footnotes on rabbit philology, and the pages and pages of lagomorph epic poetry--none of which is distracting or tiresome, by the way--the simple, universal (oh, dirty word!) story unfolds as naturally as easily as four feet can run--by heart and holy instinct. Yes, it's a film about rabbits. Deal with it. Diasporal critters have their tale too, and, oh, it sees feelingly.

Slothrop:

Slothrop, too, enjoyed the maturity of this film. Somehow Totalitarianism seems even more unpleasant when rabbits are involved. Though Kehaar, that noisy German bird did not sit well with Slothy, for what seem to be genetically ingrained reasons. Above, you will find what I think is the best painting I've ever had the privilege of sleeping under, ever.

Koko: As for Kehaar, we must attribute his slavic--not German, I think--Borisism to interspecies language barriers. Remember, he is a bird, and our exodites are rabbits; it stands to reason that anything that is not a rabbit will speak their language imperfectly. Why does he sound like a Ukranian longshoreman? That I don't know.

I think the best metric by which to measure the movie comes in the epilogue, when the black rabbit visits Hazel-rah, now an old buck, inviting him to join El-Ahrairah among the dead. We don't see this in the movie, unfortunately, but toward the end of the novel, Dandelion tells one final story about El-Ahrairah: how he led his warren to a land where it could not be destroyed. The typology between Hazel-rah and El-Ahrairah is clear, and it makes the flight from Sandelford, already passing from history into legend, far more mythological than real. Before he even accepts the black rabbit's offer, Hazel-rah has entered the company of the ancients; he is part of the rabbit mythology, and is, therefore, forever living, free from pursuit, a prince, but not the prince with a thousand enemies. And lest we forget, El-Ahrairah means prince with a thousand enemies.

We also don't see in the movie, alas, that Hazel-rah never calls the black rabbit by name, never identifies him, never hints--except once, when he answers, "Yes, my lord"--that his visitor is anything but a member of the warren. In the book we see no ethereal dark shape, no ghostly shadow, no mutable presence; we only hear a conversation between Hazel-rah and his guest. We have to infer the significance of his visit, and we know for sure only after he feels "he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch." The scene's understatement and oblique beauty increase our affection for Hazel-rah by allowing us to realize, if we so wish, that even the kings die tiredly, inevitably, and that their deaths, when they do come, pass without reluctance. The book's final passage is written quietly, and we feel as though we are falling asleep. Like Hazel-rah, we are moving gently into another world.