Poll Position: Watership Down

The Easter poll winner was “Watership Down”. I was expecting a childish and cutsey bunny movie, which I would not mind too much. But what I got was totally different; it was the exact opposite. The cutsey was traded in for graphic and childish was swapped with a dark atmosphere. This shocked me plenty and took me for a ride. Now did I enjoy the ride? Click more to find out.

Jim did a pretty good job of covering the story. So for the sake of redundancy (and laziness) I won’t retell the story, you can read it here. But I thought the story was really boring and most of the time I couldn’t follow it. It seemed that the movie would just jump around from sequence to sequence with no real build up. This made the flow of the movie really abrupt, and difficult to enjoy in regards with the movie’s story and plot.

The biggest surprise to me was the amount of adult content that was in this movie. No there was no nudity (get your mind out of the gutters), but there was a whole lot of blood. This movie would scar little kids and would make them hate rabbits forever. The amount of blood and gore in this flick rivals some action movies. Add this with the dark atmosphere and moral of this story, you get a hell of a creepy flick.

Aren't bunnies so cute?!

Another aspect that brought this movie down is the uninspiring characters. All the characters blended in with each other, and it was hard to pick out individuals. This was made more hard because the character development was poor. They started out acting the way they were, and as the movie went on, every situation would be predictable due to this.

Now the movie’s animation started off fine and I thought it was rather neat. It had this weird Native American or a hieroglyphic style of art. This kept my attention throughout the whole introduction, which I must say was done really well. I really would have liked to see more of this, or even the whole movie done in this kind of style. What really turned me off was the animation of the real detailed close up. I suppose they were trying to make the art very detailed and realistic. But it only achieved one thing: and that was utter creepiness. I didn’t find this well done or even interesting. You do see a few cool 3D effects with illusions but it was done only a few times.

This movie was not what I expected; I really wanted a cheery happy movie. And what I got was a graphic and harsh undertone. I didn’t find the story all that interesting and the characters were a bigger disappointment than finding out the Easter egg you just ate was 3 years old. I’m sorry to say but stay away from this movie.