Here’s a page showing the variety of posters/Video/DVD covers used to promote the movie:
Ranging from this:
https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/6ncDKxfghWnaRPgnBLym4Cr2nwY.jpg
To this:
https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/original/je9Jpw4HQaDqHsTAPkM9wNw3pXz.jpg
I wanted them to do this movie with real rabbits like the Babe movies.
I think Russel Crow could be an awesome Bigwig.
Awwww…cute widdle bunnies.
:eek:
Yep, pretty schizophrenic :). Can’t blame some parents for getting caught by surprise based on the first one.
Russell Crowe is a rabbit? :eek: I had no idea.
Sorry. Anyway…
I can see how the poster thing would happen. If I had to pick one word to describe the movie (or my impression of it, anyway), then “schizophrenic” wouldn’t be a bad choice (as in the “split personality” sense, not the “hearing voices” sense).
I haven’t read the book, but I’ll be checking it out.
My wife LOVES this story (as do I) but she wants to know why the rabbit prince goes by an Arabic-sounding name!
Hey, the “hearing voices” sense would work, too - think of the character Fiver. 
That’s interesting! I had never thought about Cowsli’s warren at collaborationist–though I guess that shifts the Hitler/fascist symbols to being man, not Woundwort and his warren. I remember reading that Adams said that even though many people have various interpretations of the book that he never intended any of it–that all he had in mind was an epic adventure. But it is cool to see what people have come up with.
I think the only part that is “word of god” from the author is that he based the personality of his characters on his officers in the Army during WW2.
The rest is all extrapolation on the part of the viewer … but it is pretty reasonable, given the WW2-era experiences that inspired the story, to think of the gassing of the warren as inspired by the Holocaust, and Woundwort and his warren as inspired by the Nazis - both would have been familiar issues to a soldier who survived WW2.
I admit, the Cowslip’s warren = Vichy is something I just made up. 
Keep doing that. It shows that you’re thinking.
I always want to slap authors who say things like that, because it seems to make some people think “Oh, I’ll just turn my brain off, then, and stop talking about this, since none of my perfectly valid analysis was intented”.
If it’s in the book, it’s in the book. Who cares if it was intended?
(Um. Sorry. Personal berserk button. I’ll take my rabbit and go now.)
Oh, hey - I just got this. Clever :).
We showed Plague Dogs as a double feature with Watership Down advertised as “Warm Fuzzy Animal Night” for the SciFi/Fantasy group I ran in college.
I’m willing to take Adams at his word that he never intended any of it as allegory; as evidence, I’ll note that I don’t think I’ve ever seen a proposed single allegorical interpretation that self-consistently addresses all of the various plot threads without more or less stretching. (For example, the horror of the gas at Sandleford seems to be far more reminiscent of the experiences of Western Front troops in the Great War; gas wasn’t a feature of the Second World War, militarily. Perhaps this is only because we have first hand accounts of trench gassing survivors; I don’t believe anyone survived to give us a first hand account of the showers.)
That said, Richard Adams was spinning a yarn from his own imagination and his own experiences. It’d be far more remarkable if you couldn’t draw parallels between the adventures of the Watership Down rabbits and human events.
So far as it goes, I think the most obvious theme gets overlooked in the rush to find parallels to Fascism or world wars: Empathy for our fellow creatures. I don’t know exactly where Richard Adams stood on “animal rights” in the PETA sense; generally, he strikes me as a practical chap, who understands that sometimes we’re going to rub up against other living things in ways that aren’t entirely pleasant, and in those cases, our needs, ultimately, come first. But he clearly cared for animals, and thought them worthy of our respect and understanding; Watership Down does nothing if not give you some idea of what a rabbit’s eye perspective of the world, and humans’ role in it, might be.
Anyway, ramble done.
I have an audio book version of Watership Down as well as the book. In the audio version, there’s an intro where Richard Adams explains how he used to tell stories to the kids when they were going on drives in the car, to entertain them. And every time they’d get in the car, he’d pick up the story where he left off, or add another part to it. He said that’s where Watership Down was “born” - in the car. And the kids pushed and pushed over the years to have him write it down and make a book out of it, so he finally did, enlarging the story as he went. Been a while since I’ve listened, so I don’t remember all the details. It was told in the middle of a rambling intro that I kind of half-tuned out. But I thought that was kind of neat so it’s stuck with me. 
I don’t think it is so much an “allegory” as it is that he drew from his own experiences and the times he lived through - it is, for example, “word of god” that he patterned the personality of his characters on the officers he served with in the army.
It is not too much of a stretch to see themes from WW2 era in the story - the gas killing not so much Western Front in WW1, as Nazi extermination of “undesireables” in WW2.
That said, there is no need for it to be a deliberate “allegory”. If anything, the book was patterned - in part - on the idea of “hero’s quest” he took from Campbell’s study of mythology - this isn’t a very significant speculation, because in the book at least he started chapters with quotations, many from his book, and the author has allegedly acknowledged that the book was inspired in part by it.
Of course, this would make Fiver the “hero” …
One of the things that made the film adaptation so near-perfect was because they didn’t hit you over the head hard with allegories. I saw the film first when I was around 15 or 16, and read the novel after. I remember that in the book after they free Bigwig from the snare at Cowslip’s warren Fiver (or Hazel) gives a soliloquy explaining it. How the rabbits there are allowed to live in safety & comfort in exchange for accepting that some of them will die every so often (kind of an Eloi & Morlock dystopian society). But in the film this isn’t stated outright, they just realize they must leave. But the book’s reason is the same conclusion I came to when I first watched the film, and it was satisfying to see both that I was right, and that they didn’t have to spoon-feed it to you.
I didn’t notice there was anything to ‘get’ until you mentioned that.
Then instant :smack:, of course. Woundwort! 
And in fact Bigwig nearly dies twice - he’s in an awful state after Woundwort has finished with him and he says he is done fighting for good. Hazel gets hit by a shotgun and is always slightly lame afterwards, while Fiver is a little odder for the rest of his life after the war (Bigwig states that in his opinion Fiver has paid more dearly for their victory than he did).
As for the extermination of Sandleford Warren, red-shirts they may all be but the description of the gassing of the warren certainly isn’t all sunshine and roses (very traumatic in the film as I remember when the rabbits are getting jam-packed into the blocked exit tunnels).
ISTM the only way to improve on the 1987 version is to make the rabbits nine feet long and carnivorous. With poison-barbed tentacles.