'DYour field… is covered in blood! This is the visionary young rabbit Fiver, voiced by Richard Pryor in Michael Rosen's 1978 British animation, based on the classic children's book by Richard Adams. The rabbit hole, almost as important as Tolkien's Shire, is about to be destroyed by a housing development, advertised by a cruel wooden human sign that, of course, none of the rabbits can read, but the throbbing and active Fiver can feel. the perdition Reflect.
Then his brother Hazel (voiced by John Hurt) takes Fiver and the estranged gang to remote Watership Town for safety. Among them are the brash Pickwick (Michael Graham Cox) and later the one-time adversary Captain Holly (John Bennett), a traumatized survivor of the destruction of Warren. But the Lapine band of brothers confront the tyrannical warrior General Wundwart (Harry Andrews), a terrifying figure befitting the film's '70s-style post-apocalyptic setting. However, they find an unlikely ally in a roaring bull named Kehar, voiced by Zero Mostel. The voice talent in other roles is a roster of A-list actors: Denholm Elliott, Ralph Richardson, Michael Hordern and others.
The anime was recently in the news when the British Board of Film Classification decided to increase its rating from U to PG due to the red-toothed and clawed violence the film depicts. It's actually quite shocking: Pickwick nearly suffocates on a wire net, and Holly has a gruesome account of how she stumbled upon a burrow blocked by the bodies of dead rabbits. There's also a tearful, coming-of-age moment when Pickwick sneaks into the Woundwort community by posing as a volunteer and coldly doling out whatever dowry he wants. Another very disturbing scene is the encounter with Cowslip (Eliot), whose warren is made up of sickly rabbits, who involuntarily dream of death and weakly invite Hazel and her friends to join them; They are secretly fed by humans who want to eat them. (Watching this movie now reminds me of the scene in Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with the zombified people who are imprisoned and alive as cannibals.)
Watership Town is actually a film very concerned with spirituality and the afterlife, with a Kiplingesque story from the beginning about how rabbits, a belief system centered on the god Frith and his angel of death, the Black Rabbit, came to be. Mike Bade's hit song Bright Eyes raised the grim possibility that Hazel could be dead. The animation reportedly disappointed some at the time, due to its lack of transparency compared to Disney figures; It's fair to say that the rabbits are callous compared to Bambi's hit, and the film lacks the richness of Adams' book. But now they seem to have charm and simplicity, and Rosen's animation style is perhaps the closest to Britain's Studio Ghibli.
Source link
