Watership Down · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Fiver stops on a rise above the Sandleford warren in the evening light, and the field in front of him fills with blood. Not a splash. The whole frame floods and keeps flooding, a colour wash soaking into painted grass, and then it lifts and he is a small nervous rabbit again, trying to explain something to his brother and failing.

That failure is where the film begins, and it is stranger than it looks.

Deleuze's two books on cinema turn on a single break. Most movies run on what he calls the movement-image: a character takes in a situation, works out what it needs, acts, and the situation changes. That is the grammar of adventure, and it is nearly the whole of popular film. But he found another kind, mostly postwar, where the link snaps. Something gets perceived that is too large or too wrong to be converted into a plan. The character stops being an agent and becomes a voyant, a seer. Not passive. Just stuck holding an image with no action attached to it.

Fiver is a seer, and he has been dropped into an adventure film.

What Rosen does with him is the most interesting formal decision in the picture. He does not resolve the contradiction; he splits it across two bodies. Fiver sees and cannot act. Hazel acts on a seeing that is not his own, and John Hurt plays him quiet and tired, a leader who persuades rather than commands — persuasion being what you are reduced to when your reason for moving belongs to somebody else. Deleuze calls the gap between perceiving and acting the interval: the hesitation in a living thing where a stimulus has arrived and a response has not yet been chosen. Watership Down puts that interval between two rabbits instead of inside one. The warren, not the individual, is the thing that hesitates. That is why the Threarah's refusal, in Ralph Richardson's handful of lines, reads not as stupidity but as a system failing to close a circuit, and why the film's politics are legible off group composition alone: Hazel drawn inside the cluster, Woundwort frontal and alone.

Around that break the shape is pure epic, and Deleuze has a name for that too. The large form: a situation presses on people until an act transforms it. Home destroyed, exodus, founding, siege. Critics have long read Adams against the Aeneid, and the film keeps the bones. What supplies the pressure is the encompassing milieu itself, the downland, and this is where Rosen's real invention lives.

The camera sits at rabbit height. Sightlines are blocked by stems and root-tangle; the dog, the cat, the shotgun, the fox enter frame the way they would enter a rabbit's perception, from above or from the edge, without warning. Then the film cuts high and wide and the protagonists are specks on chalk grass. Deleuze noticed that the great epics breathe like this, vast encompassing space alternating with the taut narrow line of the action, and called it respiration-space. Almost no animated feature had ever breathed. This one does it in watercolour, and the register mismatch everyone argues about — atmospheric painted backgrounds against flatter character cels — stops looking like a limitation once you read it as ontology. The land is denser than the animals on it, and will outlast them.

The debt is specific. Bambi gave the crew weight-bearing quadruped locomotion and the horizon set at animal height, plus the precedent of a mass death occurring off-screen as the film's structural hinge, which is exactly what the gassing of Sandleford is. The Living Desert gave Rosen something Bambi could not: the low telephoto burrow-mouth position, and a documentary contract that lets a predator kill without the film intervening. This matters theoretically. Bazin argued that a photograph moves us because the thing was actually there in front of the lens, an ontological bond animation simply does not have. Rosen's answer is to borrow the wildlife unit's grammar instead of its referent. Credibility comes from lens position, from the refusal to cut away in mercy, from naturalism carried to a fault: no clothes, no anthropomorphic hands, no facial caricature, differentiation by colouring and scarring and posture. It is a hand-drawn documentary contract. It is the reason the blood lands.

The journey is episodic, each stop with its own visual logic. Deleuze calls a trajectory like this the line of the universe, a zig-zag stitching together spaces that have nothing to do with each other: heath, river, farm, burrow. Cowslip's warren is the best of them, and a textbook case of what Deleuze, borrowing from Zola, calls the originary world: an ordinary place that turns out to be the crust over something raw. Indolent shadow, unspoken wrongness, rabbits arranged in a stillness that tells you something has been traded away. Denholm Elliott plays the courtesy as quietly obscene. Nothing is explained. The naturalism holds the surface while a drive works underneath it.

Two things escape the frame entirely. The red is one. It does not stylise violence; it absorbs the scene and becomes its feeling, using the multiple-exposure trick from Fantasia's Bald Mountain apparitions on a premonition rather than a spectacle. And because those visions belong to no memory and no date, they are what Deleuze calls dream-images: circuits running loose of any past you could point to. The other is the Black Rabbit of Inlé, the purest absolute out-of-field in the film — Deleuze's term for something the frame implies that could never be found in an adjoining room. Death is never staged as an event. It has a name in Lapine, a place in the mythology, and finally, in the coda, an old rabbit walking away with it.

Which brings up the film's most under-discussed move. The prologue is Hubley's surviving conception, flat and friezelike in ochre and black, the crayon-and-wash register he had built in Of Stars and Men. It looks like a different film because it is one. Rosen kept it anyway. So the plot is continually re-read through the rabbits' own storytelling: El-ahrairah, Frith, Hordern's liturgical narration, Lapine left untranslated so that context does work no glossary could. Deleuze calls this fabulation, a people caught in the act of legending itself into existence. Watership Down is literal about it. A warren is destroyed, no people remains, one has to be made. And the film closes the loop by folding its own antagonist into the myth: Woundwort vanishes rather than dies, and survives as a story rabbits tell.

What it did. Terry Rawlings cut the violence on collision and aftermath — short shots at impact, a held stillness on the body — and took that straight to Alien the following year. Animation got a permanent counter-example. The Plague Dogs, The Secret of NIMH, When the Wind Blows, Grave of the Fireflies: all proceed from the conviction this film made unignorable, that hand-drawing is a medium and its association with childhood is a distribution accident. The BBFC took forty-four years to move it from U to PG, which is one way of admitting a film was right.

Watch it again for Fiver. Everyone remembers the blood. Almost nobody notices that the film's real subject is a small rabbit who can only see, and a friend who agrees to act anyway.