Watership Down (Netflix)

[nelsonmuntz]

Watching it now. As you can guess from my avatar, this is one of my favorite books of all time. It works on the most fundamental level of being an adventure story, a modern Odyssey, and you would see components of later adventure stories that were clearly borrowed from Watership Down. The parts of the Road that I have seen have some obvious similarities. This book/movie also works as a scathing political allegory on authoritarianism and the dangers of conformity, that is almost more relevant today than when it was written in 1972.

The cast for the Netflix/BBC remake is incredible, with James McAvoy, Nicholas Hoult, Tom Wilkinson, John Boyega, Ben Kingsley, Taron Egerton and Rosamund Pike all providing voices, in addition to about a dozen "that guys" that you may recognize if you go to IMDB. There was basically no way they could go wrong, and yet they did.

The animation is scalitoey and looks like a high school A/V project. It is worse than the animation in the 1978 movie, which was made 40 scalitoing years ago. Of all the places to cut corners, why would they do that? It is still really good because the story is so good, but with modern CGI, it could have been incredible. Instead, I end up tolerating the sloppy animation because I love the story so much.

 

[huskypantz]

Loved the book and movie as a kid. I will have to check this out.

 

[nwhoopfan]

I don't have Netflix streaming, but my parents do. I watched the first installment over the holidays. It was fine, but I'll probably be okay without seeing the rest of it.

 

[nelsonmuntz]

It is still pretty awesome. The adaptation was well written, and a miniseries is a better format than a movie for such a rich book. There were a few changes from the book that I don't understand, but nothing worth complaining about. The tension built up really well at the end. The actors did a great job.

I don't get why the animation was so bad. It seems deliberate. There is so much they could have done with CGI. Instead, the rabbits look too skinny, and the movement is awkward and clunky. The fight scenes were OK, but could have been so much better. The animation was also inconsistent. I thought the final confrontation was pretty good, but some of the other big scenes, like the escape, looked rushed and lazy.

 

[ZooCougar]

Avoid. Couldn’t get through 5 minutes. Animation so bad.