Film // Watership Down

Directed by   Martin Rosen

Running time 101 minutes 

Watership Down is a British animated adventure drama that was released in 1978 and based on the book of the same name by Richard Adams. Upon its release, the film was an immediate success, and became the sixth most popular film in the 1979 British box office. 

The animation style of Watership Down could be considered a very serious form of cartoon animation with detail and a very natural expression of movement with little exaggeration often seen in cartoons. However, the animals depicted in the film are sometimes animated anthropomorphically when they are given facial expressions and human voices etc. The locations are based around diagrams from the Richard Adam's book, so a lot of research and careful consideration would have gone into the production of the film, even with things like the animation style. Something that this animated feature did was emulate the dark and violent themes and nature of the book, instead of altering the plot to suit a wider audience which I consider a bold and important move. 

The themes of nature and leadership play a very important role in the film, and the development of characters in the story is vital to convey these themes. I think also, because of the seriousness of the themes and they story as a a whole the art style complimenting that was quite important. The art style for backgrounds is very 'realistic', it looks almost like an oil painting of a natural scene in places which reinforces the seriousness of the plot rather than allowing it to stray from this. The colours used are also washed out rather than bright. The greens are very saturated and the browns are murky, the film rarely strays from this type of colour palette at any point. 

The camera angles at points in Watership Down are you used effectively to make the scenes more intense or frightening. When a camera zooms in fast or pans across the screen at a fast pace it can be very alarming to the audience, because it's unexpected and depicts a piece of

action in a quick movement. Examples of this kind of quick, intense camera movement are used in the scenes where the animals, mainly rabbits attack each other or brawl. Another point to be made is that animal violence is very rarely shown or seen, and thus the intensity of the scenes where animals are violent may be exacerbated by this whereas violence amongst humans in all forms is shown across a range of media, including film and animation. In contrast to the number of violent acts in the film there are also moments that are intended to be quite moving to the audience such as the death of characters, and the emotional response other characters have to this, again including animals.