Hacker Cinema
Watership Down
1978 · Film · 92 min
Directed by Martin Rosen
When the warren belonging to a community of rabbits is threatened, a brave group led by Fiver, Bigwig, Blackberry and Hazel leave their homeland in a search of a safe new haven.
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17 comments on Hacker News
The only two animated films that have ever triggered an emotional response are Watership Down (when I was a kid) and Ghibli's Grave of the Fireflies (when I was an adult). Both were really heavy in ways that are hard to articulate.
The trailer for the latter:
https://youtu.be/4vPeTSRd580?si=CAN__Md9KIKQcehN
I remember watching the Watership Down film as a young child and being rather disturbed. I think it set me up well for watching Nightmare on Elm Street when I was about 9 though.
However, I've turned into a fairly well rounded individual (I don't try to murder rabbits or children in their dreams at least). The only downside is that I don't find horror films or rabbits particularly interesting.
Something recently made me think of Moses the raven though.
I've watched pretty much every episode at least 50 times, my wife also watched it as a kid and got our oldest addicted to it.
Fantastic cartoon, impressive how they handled facisme. Guess certain Dutch politicians either didn't see it or did and got inspired by Dolf.
In related news, I've also seen every episode of True and Nijnje (90s, 00s and specials) a similar number of times for kid #2 and kid #3 :)
I grew up in the UK so as a kid I was traumatised by Yellow Submarine, Tottie (dollhouse burns down killing everyone), Watership Down and the aforementioned Animals of Farthing Wood.
> The Plague Dogs
I think a LOT of UK school kids were truamatised by this, a lot of teachers, saw it thought 'oh, same author (Richard Adams) and director (Martin Rosen) as Watership Down, lets stick the kids in front of this while we do something else.
Man, that film was harrowing.
Watership Down and the Secret of Nimh were my two favorite movies as a young child in the early 80s, followed closely by the Dark Crystal and maybe Aristocats and the Black Hole.
Other movies of the time like the Rescuers and the Fox and the Hound and Labyrinth and such were a disappointment compared to these...
Did the Watership Down remake get sanitized? I never watched it, having been part of a generation of Australians who all got taken as school children to see it and scarred for life. It was just assumed animations are for kids. It must have been hell for the teachers, dealing with a class of traumatized 6 year olds in a cinema.
There's suggestions of casual sex and outright sexual behavior in Nightmare Before Christmas, and misogyny/rape in Watership Down. Nightmare Before Christmas includes some suggestions of using alcohol or other drugs on some of the villains.
What evidence is there that normalizing violence is less problematic to a child?
>heavy drinking,
Sure, that's not a great thing to normalize.
>tattooing,
What's wrong with tattoos?
>casual sex,
Again, something suggested in other PG movies from farther back. If your kids can handle it, they can watch it. If not, don't let them. That's what PG has always meant. It's not graphic, it doesn't show any of the foreplay, therefor it fits with the standard of PG that has existed forever.
>deviant sex,
Wait, what? Two men having sex is now deviant sex? Uh, yeah, not gonna agree there.
>dangerous sex,
Again, because it's two men? Where are you going with this?
>and related forms of degenerate behavior.
The only degenerate behavior on this list is the heavy drinking, and even that is being fairly generous to you - plenty of people have nights where they drink heavily and aren't degenerate and don't let it impact their life.
>It's totally different and much more insidious than cartoon or animal predator/prey violence.
You're making pretty huge statements here without any evidence to back it up. I don't know how much of an impact that the sort of scene in Alvin and the Chipmunk's would have on a child - I would guess probably not much, as much of the implications discussed are likely to fly right over their head - but we do know that violence, even cartoon violence, has an affect on children. http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/child-adolescent-psychiatry/violence-media-what-effects-behavior
PG movies have had this sort of content for decades. PG has never meant 'You can just show any of your young kids this.' - that is what the G rating is for. PG has always meant that there are things that you might find questionable for your child and that your parental discretion should be exercised. It's not insidious.
>There was a scene where the male Air Marshall (who was following them), woke up in a drunken haze (yes, there was a scene where shots and drinks were involved) with 2 new tattoosand in the bedroom or hotel room with another man (and all that that implied)."
This appears to be a PG rated movie. This is nothing new. Let's take a step back nearly 25 years and check out things that happen in 'The Nightmare Before Christmas', a movie with the same rating:
Finkelstein makes himself a female doll. A detached leg is used to seduce a villain, whom promptly begins to engage in foot play. There is a torture chamber crossed with a casino, where the casino games determine the level of torture inflicted. There's a skinned head, various detached body parts, brains, etc.
Let's go back farther! Watership Down - 40 years ago.
Doe rabbits fancied by one of the villains are offered up in compensation for his efforts. References to the needs of doe rabbits to sustain the warren Various bits of violence/gore with the rabbits, including a rabbit choking on a snare and coughing up blood Mild profanity - use of 'Damn' and 'Piss', with Fuck replaced with 'Frisk' in several instances.
>There is just no way this stuff is age appropriate. I don't care how far the Overton window has shifted.
PG as a rating is specifically not any sort of indication to age appropriateness. Emotional development of children in the ages in question is going to vary drastically, and the whole point is that it is then suggested that the parents, knowing best what content their children will be able to handle, make the decision. The maturity level of content in PG movies has, if anything, dropped over the years.
Note that I am not questioning your choices on what you find appropriate for your children, just your interpretation of what PG means and whether or not the Overton window has shifted.
Watership Down, Secret of Nimh, and The Dark Crystal were probably the most influential films of my childhood. It would be a terrible loss for any of them to be recategorized away from children.
A film recommendation for you: Watership Down.
A seriously traumatising bit of literature, and I'm on the fence over whether it was a positive influence in my life or a negative one - and whether I want my own kids to now read it/experience it, or not.
On the one hand, it most definitely highlights the fragility of the human condition. On the other hand, it definitely highlights the fragility of the human condition.
In my case, back in 1978 as an 8-year old kid, the movie was definitely a major cause of upset and trauma. Would I now receive cathartic relief by introducing it to my own ~8 year old kids? I'm wondering if I'm going to gain anything by inducing my own children to confront the reality of the mob at such an age - even if I, myself, went through it and seem to have come out okay. The conundrum is, perhaps I've become Watership Down, all the while resisting it ..
I have lost count of the number of non-Brits I know living here that have watched Watership Down as adults and expressed incredulity that it is considered a children's film here!
Man, I had nightmares from the Watership Down movie as a kid. Now I feel like I have to watch Plague Dogs just to balance things out.
You can also find the "bridge under the iron road" using the map from the original book, though there isn't a public right of way to it. It looks a lot like the one in the film though with trees grown bigger.
Trivia: much of the actual watership down is owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
Like Watership Down, Plague Dogs was made into an animated film, which can be found available on the intertubes.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084509/
I see an impactful animated film, like Watership Down, or VR experience where the reveal is you're one of these ants.
I was thinking, "Atlas Shrugged, what the fuck?" but then I re-read the title of the article. As is [ironically with a sense that is lost upon them] common to admirers of Ayn Rand, the author feels compelled to "should" on their readers. I was warned.
I've read most everything on the list, though the dead horse of Animal Farm was first beaten for me in sixth grade...and that was long enough ago that Cold War MADness was a reality in the days when "PG" on a movie meant "tits" and Murray and Ramos could parody the US Army...if the list has talking animals, where is Watership Down?
But I digress...
A few years ago, I came back to science fiction and started reading the Hugo Award novels. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugo_Award_for_Best_Novel#Winners_and_nominees
What I found is that the list gives context to the novels...the line of telephones ringing are forgivable in 1985's Neuromancer in a way that they wouldn't be in a movie made today. The competence of the grunts in 1960's Starship Troopers is a reaction to the USMC in the Second World War and the experience of the US military during the shooting phase of the Korean War. 1998's Forever Peace shows how much computers changed the meanings of "combatant" and "battlefield" in the subsequent 40 years.
One of the other interesting themes of science fiction is the evolution of the post-apocalyptic world. The alien invasion of 1950's Day of the Triffids and the pandemic of 1949's Earth Abides [not a Hugo Novels] giving way to the nuclear wastelands of 1961's Canticle for Leibowitz's and 1966's This Immortal [when Zelzany's novel tied Herbert's Dune for the Hugo and rightly so].
By 1996's Diamond Age or 2010's Windup Girl the apocalypse is a slow moving tragedy of the commons brought on not by rash misunderstanding but by long term economic rationalizations...bringing us full circle, and you were warned.