Dear BBC – There Is A Rather Obvious Fatal Flaw With Your ‘Watership Down’ Television Movies

Here is the original 1979 version:

Bigwig and Dandelion and Hazel and Fiver and Blackberry and Pipkin – wondering why Violet’s flying through the sky in the bloody talons of a hawk.

Then wondering who Violet was anyway as they weren’t in the book!

You were able to rhyme off the names the second you saw this shot, right?

Now for the BBC version.

Oh look it’s Hazel and Fiver, but which one is which? They are impossible to tell apart!

The background scenery is brilliant, even if not canon in parts – Efrafa now in an abandoned factory which looks like the basement of the Shalebridge Cradle instead of the crossroads of a bridle path. If you’ve ever wanted to see what Nuthanger Farm really looks like, it’s a faultless job.

Pity the rabbits (which look and move more like hares) are so hard to tell apart and so difficult to remember. Even their voices largely melt into Stepford levels of sameness. Amusingly, General Woundwort once more sports that non-book blind white left eye from 1979 which has become the character’s signature enough to also appear in the hopeless children’s ITV series many years ago. Less amusing is his supermodel svelteness – this one doesn’t look like he could knock the skin off the producer’s skinny Nescafé.

The other animals are done so badly it’s painful. Everyone knows crows and all other corvidae attack with quick stabbing motions with their beaks while staying partly in flight (to get out of trouble as fast as they got into it should their victim prove a more dangerous adversary than taken for), not trying to attack with the claws on their feet or ‘bite’ with their beaks – biting in combat is by those with teeth. Nuthanger Farm’s Bob is now a rottweiler, not a black labrador, a breed largely unknown in the 1970s and certainly never kept on a working farm. Working farms mean working farm dogs: sheepdogs, retrievers, not the canine equivalent of nightclub bouncers. As for Tab the cat, let’s say a cat is what it is supposed to look like.

If the BBC were desperate for something to touch base with the LGBTQ+ agitprop industry – as they forever are – they could have left in Bigwig’s trans-species obsession with Kehaar from the book, not swapped it out for Bluebell behaving as if he’s got a gay crush on Blackberry. The gull’s role is pivotal in the book, in this version the producers appeared clueless what to do with the character. Peter Capaldi’s och-aye-the-noo-up-yer-cottontails-Jimmy porridge kitsch Kehaar – not quite as dreadful as the late Rik Mayell’s comedy Kehaar for the ITV version, but bad nevertheless – as least shows consistency in that everything this man touches these days is doomed to turn to hraka.

Let’s not even go into the deviations from the story – the stupidity of which is encapsulated by cutting out anything from the original which may result in anyone complaining it left them ‘triggered’ yet adding in new parts which merely highlight how poor the CGI animation is, including a fight with a murder of crows in an abandoned church (the idea taken from the ‘offstage’ rats in the barn battle from the book and 1979 film) – the visuals may look 2018, but the movements look Minecraft.

Worst of all, and what becomes steadily more jarring as the films go on, if you watch the remake, the foliage does not move – basic computer game standard animation now regarded as essential for immersion. The water and rivers looks good, but this is about all you can say for it. It’s almost a metaphor for the whole show – Water It Down.