From Watership Down to Warren Street

Nearly forty years since its release, the film version of Richard Adams’ rabbit saga Watership Down is stirring up a bit of controversy (see below). It brings back memories of when I worked on the film for five or six months starting in the autumn of 1976 when a creative controversy was coming to a head at the Nepenthe Productions studio in Suffolk House, tucked away behind the Tottenham Court Road, near Warren Street tube station.

Producer Martin Rosen was, I guess, aiming to tell the story in a gritty and compelling way, getting as near as he could to the immediacy of a live action drama: a road movie come war film. 

This was probably one of the causes of friction with John Hubley, his director, who was going for a more playful, graphically inventive approach by introducing the folk tales and myths of Adams’ rabbit world as stories within a story. The creation myth at the start of the film is about all that survives of this interpretation.

At my interview, John Hubley looked through my sketchbook and picked out a pen and watercolour sketch of a hawthorn branch: “I’d use this just as it is, with a white background and have the rabbits moving through the drawing.”

His assistant Luci sent me some cell to practice on: “We use this for ‘OVERLAYS’ which are the foreground pieces (rabbits scamper behind) & so give credence to the background as well as a further dimension. It would be nice to have these plants in your free but accurate style”.

‘Free but accurate’, I like that; I was just a year out of art college at the time but at least somebody understood what I was aiming at and could find a use for my approach to drawing.

Black Rabbit

Martin Rosen, producer of Watership Down, and director after he dismissed John Hubley, told me that he’d bought the rights to the book after reading it on a beach in India (Goa?): it was a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, he said, which wasn’t true of every novel. This was in a conversation in the spring of 1977, after I’d finished work on the film and arranged to take a group of my Leeds Polytechnic Communication Design students on a visit to the studio. We gathered around his desk; “I wanted to include more of this sort of thing,” he said, rubbing his upper arm, “the sound of one rabbit brushing past another in the burrow.”

Watership Down became a staple of bank holiday and Christmas viewing but this year, at Easter, when it was shown on Channel 4, some parents complained that the violence in the film upset their children.

That wasn’t that problem in 1978 as the book had been a bestseller and  readers were never expecting a cute tale about fluffy bunnies. I think that I remember one or two children being upset during screenings of the film but it was the scene where the Black Rabbit comes for Hazel that always left me with a tear in my eye.

I worked on the film as ‘assistant background artist’ which makes it sound as if I just cleaned out the brushes; I would have preferred ‘natural history troubleshooter’ because the animators came to me when they wanted a close up of a stem of grass, or the bottom of a hedge and I’m proud of my set designs for Cowslip’s Warren, which the producer saw as a claustrophobic Victorian vicarage.

Although I worked on the film for six months my contribution amounts to no more than two minutes of screen time, so, yes, ‘assistant background artist’ is a fair description.

Now there are plans to make a television series based on the book but better suited to the sensibilities of 21st century audiences, with less violence and stronger female characters. There was an element of violence in Adams’ novels. I once met his editor (or was it his agent?) who told me that he’d insisted on some of the more violent passages in Shardick being removed from the book.

Martin Rosen went on to produce a film version of Adams’ novel Plague Dogs, following the escape of two dogs from a vivisection research centre in the Lake District. I didn’t catch it on its cinema release and I’ve never spotted it turning up on television, so I suspect that the tone of the film was too dark for most viewers.