Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
BRITAIN’S BRAVEST BUNNIES ARE BACK
With an all-star cast and brilliant CGI, Watership Down – the tale of a group of rabbits in search of a safe haven – has been remade for a new generation
What started as a simple story made up by Richard Adams for his daughters on long car journeys has become a classic of English literature. The civil servant could not have envisaged how his tale would become not only a bestselling novel, but also a film that traumatised a generation of children with its haunting scenes of beloved rabbit characters meeting grisly ends.
This Christmas, however, a new generation will be introduced to the magic of Watership Down with a remake of the story for a new era. The BBC has teamed up with Netflix for one of the most expensive mini-series ever made featuring an all-star voice cast for the CGI rabbits, which will air in two featurelength episodes next weekend. And they promise it will not scar young viewers, but will restore the novel’s reputation as a survival and adventure story.
Adams had never written a word of fiction before he wrote Watership Down at the age of 46. Having told his young daughters the story when they were eight and six, they urged him to write it down and the result was a deeply moving tale about a group of rabbits on a perilous journey away from the impending destruction of their warren. After many failed attempts at finding a publisher, Rex Collings took it on but the first print run in 1972 was just 2,500 copies – all Collings could afford. However, it wasn’t long before Richard’s stout-hearted rabbits Hazel, Fiver and Bigwig were as famous as Peter Rabbit and Br’er Rabbit.
The infamous 1978 animated film, featuring the voice of John Hurt, has gone down in history for its shocking scenes of animal deaths. It was given a U certificate, but the British Board of Film Classification recently said it had received complaints ‘almost every year since’. In this new adaptation, the BBC has toned down the violence to tell the story – set in the idyllic landscape of southern England – of how Fiver, haunted by visions of destruction, and his brother Hazel lead tough rabbit Bigwig and others on a journey from their native Sandleford Warren to a refuge at Watership Down – a real place in Hampshire. Along the way they face danger, from Bigwig getting trapped in a snare (a chilling scene that Richard’s wife Elizabeth tried to get him to scrap) to the sinister atmosphere of a rabbit named Cowslip’s warren and the despotic General Woundwort, founder of the Efrafa warren.
‘I hadn’t read the book, I’d only seen the film as a child,’ says Gemma Arterton, the voice of Clover, a hutch rabbit who’s liberated by Hazel and his followers. ‘I was absolutely traumatised by it. I remember it not being joyful and bunny-like. So it was great reading the book and doing this film, seeing there was so much more to it.
‘I don’t know if Clover looks like me. Maybe the shape of her face is like mine – quite round. They film us when we do the dialogue, and a lot of the movements come from us – the way our eyes or noses move. I had to do a rabbit sniff. You pretend you’re running away from a cat and sniffing the air. I was getting really lightheaded by the end.
‘You have to kind of be a child to do this. Yet Watership Down is supposed to frighten people. It’s a wake-up call to look at what we’re doing to our environment and society. It’s an epic, beautiful story – filled with tragedy.’
James McAvoy, who voices
‘The rabbits’ movements are based on ours’ GEMMA ARTERTON
Hazel, agrees. ‘My first memory of it was when I had a friend round from school when my entire extended family were over. The only place to eat our dinner was in front of the TV and the film Watership Down was on. I looked at my friend and he was crying. I said, “Are you all right mate?” and he said, “I want to go home.”’
Why did James take the role? ‘From the deep love and terror that watching the 1978 film put inside my bones, and then from reading the novel later in life when it blew me away again. I was excited to bring Watership Down to a new generation on such a huge scale. When I got the email asking if I was interested, I was wearing my Watership Down Tshirt. So I took a selfie and sent it b a ck s ay i ng, “Check it out man. This is fate, I’m wearing that T-shirt right now,”’ he laughs. It was via James that Nicholas Hoult, who’s cast as Fiver, heard that Watership Down was being remade. ‘He told me when we were working together on an X-Men film. I was so excited by it, and he explained to the producers that we’re really good friends and have a brotherly relationship. James plays Hazel, so it made sense for me to play Fiver, his younger brother.’ Nicholas loves the rabbits’ fictional language – known as lapine. ‘One of the fascinating things about this – and also what makes it quite difficult – is that there’s a wonderful language the rabbits use to describe human things, such as “hrududu” which means car.’ And how did he prepare for the role? ‘I lived in a hutch for five weeks,’ he jokes. ‘I’ve only been eating carrots – I can see in the dark very well. And I have big ears and a little tail that I put on when I’m at home!’
The cast also includes Olivia Colman as Strawberry, who was a male rabbit in the book, Sir Ben Kingsley as General Woundwort and John Boyega as Bigwig, plus Peter Capaldi, Mackenzie Crook, Anne-Marie Duff and Rosamund Pike, who all faced some disturbing scenes. But more than anything, Watership Down is a celebration of the British countryside. ‘We wanted to make sure it’s represented properly. It’s part of the heart of what the story is about,’ says director Noam Murro. ‘It had to be authentic. We’d get emails from Richard’s daughter Julia with photographs of what the countryside looked like at particular moments from her childhood. And we visited the real Watership Down a lot.
‘Watership Down began as a story Richard told his daughters, but now it’s a universal story that’s still relevant today. It touches on timeless themes: the meaning of home, migration, who we are and how the stories we tell shape our society.’
Watership Down will air on BBC1 on Saturday 22 December at 7pm and Sunday 23 December at 7.20pm.