Watership Down

1978 • 92 minutes

About this movie

With this passion project, screenwriter-producer-director Martin Rosen brilliantly achieved what had been thought nearly impossible: a faithful big-screen adaptation of Richard Adams’s classic British dystopian novel about a community of rabbits under terrible threat from modern forces. With its naturalistic hand-drawn animation, dreamily expressionistic touches, gorgeously bucolic background design, and elegant voice work from such superb English actors as John Hurt, Ralph Richardson, Richard Briers, and Denholm Elliott, Watership Down is an emotionally arresting, dark-toned allegory about freedom amid political turmoil.

Ratings and reviews

I went to the library as 10 years old, I saw thd cute bunnies and watched it when I came back home then I saw the gore, the blood and the bunnies suffocating underground made my soul ripped off in half.

Great Movie and book. I think its only really understood bychildren. The need to help other and eachother to survive. That there will always be bullies (IE thebad bunnies) who want to take what you have. And then the dangers from everywhere else. Idk if its just because im a child of the 80s and the whole stranger danger but i get and understood that. I think the reason Adults dont like it as much is because they see their own actions in the film. When i watch it now as an adult im so pessimistic i cant even believe the good bunnies can work together. All my siblings loved this movie until my youngest born in 2000. Its too slow they cant sit and watch it. Phone phones phones.

Loved this when I was 9 and was deeply affected by it. Just watched it with my own eight-year-olds who loved it as well (we’d read the book together first). Full of darkness and light, and real struggle and animal violence that will horrify some parents, especially those who like their movies more Disneyesque.