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BBC and Netflix will produce a "Watership down" Miniseries

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Tertullian

Member
Ridley327 said:
There are good intentions behind the idea of making female characters more prominent, but I feel like they're not realizing that they're heaping on an anthropomorphic element to a story where it doesn't exist. Not every talking animal story needs a human touch, if you understand what I'm getting at.
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I don't see how female rabbits are any more anthropomorphic than male rabbits.

I'm not sure how you pull off having more prominent female rabbits, though, given that most of the plot of the book is predicated on Hazel's people not having any female rabbits.
 
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Kyleripman

Member
I fucking adore this book but I've never actually seen the movie. I really like BBC's radio adaptation, though. The actors in that are just perfect for the characters.
 
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| Praxis |

Banned
I doubt The Animals of Farthing Wood would get made now. That had some violent scenes in it (the butcher bird killing the babies, hedgehogs on the road) that reminded me of Watership Down. Liked it as a kid.
 
H

HolyCheck

I want a tag give me a tag
| Praxis | said:
I doubt The Animals of Farthing Wood would get made now. That had some violent scenes in it (the butcher bird killing the babies, hedgehogs on the road) that reminded me of Watership Down. Liked it as a kid.
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The whole thing with moles son pretending to be mole because a dying aging badger has alzheimer's. Then Badger dies and mole jnr is like "at least I don't have to be my father anymore :("
 
B

Booker Dewitt

Member
That's a bummer that they're softening it, I'm of the mind that kids should get some scary Shit in films.

But yeah, I'm still amazed that I stumbled upon this and Plague Dogs on vhs at my Catholic church's makeshift library.
 
R

Ridley327

Member
NYCmetsfan said:
rabbits with language, myths and complex culture is good but beefing up women is too unrealistic they should be required to just be baby dispensers?

this is completely nonsensical
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You're missing the point of what I'm saying. There is absolutely nothing wrong at all with any of the mythology that the story plays around with, but there's still a hard dose of reality in maintaining their real-world behaviors on top of making them sun-worshiping critters. That's actually what makes the whole story so interesting is that there is that element of fantasy to go along with normal biological behavior and giving words to their thoughts and feelings about how they interpret life. It's something that looks like Bambi and sounds like, but goes into far more intellectually intriguing territory pretty damn quickly and helps it resonate a lot deeper. Bambi is unquestionably a more iconic film, but Watership Down is so much more interesting to talk about because of that level of depth and care it displays.

And, as it has been pointed out, there is an issue of how you would beef up a role for a female character when there really aren't any roles for them in the first place. As Tertullian points out:

Tertullian said:
I'm not sure how you pull off having more prominent female rabbits, though, given that most of the plot of the book is predicated on Hazel's people not having any female rabbits.
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There's not a whole lot they can do here without it feeling very bolted on.
 
K

Kyleripman

Member
Eh there are several female rabbits involved in the last third of the book or so, one of them having the same psychic powers as Fiver. I don't see any problem with giving them a little more screentime.

"Tales from Watership Down" had even more. Also an excellent read, with some of the stories having an unexpected element of horror.
 
N

NYCmetsfan

Banned
Ridley327 said:
You're missing the point of what I'm saying. There is absolutely nothing wrong at all with any of the mythology that the story plays around with, but there's still a hard dose of reality in maintaining their real-world behaviors on top of making them sun-worshiping critters. That's actually what makes the whole story so interesting is that there is that element of fantasy to go along with normal biological behavior and giving words to their thoughts and feelings about how they interpret life. It's something that looks like Bambi and sounds like, but goes into far more intellectually intriguing territory pretty damn quickly and helps it resonate a lot deeper. Bambi is unquestionably a more iconic film, but Watership Down is so much more interesting to talk about because of that level of depth and care it displays.
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This isn't an argument. You're just stating that you think one change is ok and one isn't.

Rabbits don't worship anything, that's fictional. They don't talk, that's fictional. None of that is biological.

Randomly asserting that making women more prominent (which is what the author did in the follow ups) is too far makes no sense. Why are certain things ok, but not others? Why is changing rabbits general roles a no-no but the fact that they have culture, language and myths ok?

This reads like a lot of the we can't change race, age, gender in many other arguments, "just because that's how it was".
 
W

WarRock

Member
Tertullian said:
I don't see how female rabbits are any more anthropomorphic than male rabbits.

I'm not sure how you pull off having more prominent female rabbits, though, given that most of the plot of the book is predicated on Hazel's people not having any female rabbits.
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Well, considering how the original movie treated the females, seems pretty simple. Hazel literally goes from "hey, we can free you guys if ya want" to "hey, come on, yes, EVERYONE OF YOUR FRIENDS TOO I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU WANT" pretty quick and then the movie ignored what this meant to the female rabbits.

I watched it for the first time last year and that REALLY stands out.

And then there's this:
In "Male Chauvinist Rabbits," an essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review, Selma G. Lanes criticized Adams's treatment of gender. She observed that the first third of the story is a "celebration of male camaraderie, competence, bravery and loyalty as a scraggly bunch of yearling bucks ... arrive triumphant at a prospectively ideal spot", only to realize that they have no females for mating. "Fully the last two-thirds of Adams's saga," Lanes argued, "is devoted to what one male reviewer has blithely labelled The Rape of the Sabine Rabbits, a ruthless, single-minded and rather mean-spirited search for females – not because Watership Down's males miss their companionship or yearn for love, but rather to perpetuate the existing band." For Adams, Lanes continued, the does are only "instruments of reproduction" to prevent the achievement of reaching Watership Down from "becoming a hollow victory." As evidence, Lanes pointed to Hazel and Holly's assessment of the rescued Nuthanger does' value: "it came naturally ... to consider the two Nuthanger does simply as breeding stock for the warren."

Lanes argued that this view of the female rabbits came from Adams himself rather than his source text, Ronald Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit. In Lockley's text, by contrast, the rabbit world is matriarchal, and new warrens are always initiated by dissatisfied, young females. Hence, Lanes concluded, Adams's novel is "marred by an attitude towards females that finds more confirmation in Hugh Hefner's Playboy than R. M. Lockley's The Private Life of the Rabbit."

(...)

Adams' 1996 sequel, Tales from Watership Down includes stories where the female rabbits play a more prominent role in the Watership Down warren. It has been suggested that this might have been an attempt to modernise the story, to make it more in tune with the political sensibilities of the 1990s, when it was published.
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Ridley327

Member
NYCmetsfan said:
This isn't an argument. You're just stating that you think one change is ok and one isn't.

Rabbits don't worship anything, that's fictional. They don't talk, that's fictional. None of that is biological.

Randomly asserting that making women more prominent (which is what the author did in the follow ups) is too far makes no sense. Why are certain things ok, but not others? Why is changing rabbits general roles a no-no but the fact that they have culture, language and myths ok?

This reads like a lot of the we can't change race, age, gender in many other arguments, just because that's how it was.
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If you want to keep it simple, it's because it's a deviation from the original text that likely won't have the author's involvement, and given the general feeling that this adaptation is being softened even further than other recent attempts, the new element seemingly exists just to make it more palatable to the masses. Again, I don't think it's coming from a bad place to incorporate those elements at all, but I have concerns about how well it'll play out without feeling bolted on in a mundane and ultimately disappointing way.

Have they ever tried to adapt the follow-up short story collection? If they haven't, I feel like that would be a more interesting project to pursue, since it felt like that there was a lot of material that could be explored beyond the confines of the original story.
 
R

robochimp

Member
Miles Quaritch said:
Toned down? The violence of the original was why it was so good.

It didn't pull any punches, toning it down is missing the point.
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Mangled bunnies was not why it was so good.

I would be fine having my kids read the book, I would not go out of my way to show them the movie.
 
pancakesandsex

pancakesandsex

Member
I hope it looks like that Cat Shit One short.

Cat+Shit+One+-+Video-2.gif
 
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Ridley327

Member
Miles Quaritch said:
Toned down? The violence of the original was why it was so good.

It didn't pull any punches, toning it down is missing the point.
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I do feel there's a balance that can be achieved that can allow for the impact of the violence to land as it's intended without needing to be completely explicit. Just to give an example off the top of my head, there's actually not a hell of a lot of on-screen violence or blood shown in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but it's able to feel just as nasty and brutal as anything that shows it all because of some top-notch editing decisions that force the viewer to fill in the blanks that have been intentionally left in. From a purely visual standpoint, as far as the raw content of the images being shown to you, the original filmed adaptation of Watership Down is in my recollection a substantially more graphic film when you compare to the two, but the tactics employed by the filmmakers of TCM help to make the two feel like that they're on equal footing in terms of depiction.

I'm not anticipating that either the BBC, Netflix and whichever production company is going to do the actual animation are interested in that level of nuance and suggestiveness, but I'm always willing to be surprised and delighted if it does work out that way in the end.
 
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