Watership Down: A One-Way Ticket to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?
My generation was traumatised by the Richard Adams classic. I don’t understand why.
Richard Adams’s Watership Down is one of my favourite stories. In fact, it is one of a very small handful of novels to make me cry (during the final couple of pages). I also enjoyed the 1978 animated film, which captures the mood of the text very well.
However, it is also true that many from my generation consider Watership Down (the book and more notoriously the film) to be one of the most singularly traumatic experiences of their childhood — and not in a good way! A 2013 video on film critic Mark Kermode’s now sadly defunct blog discussing U certificate films (the UK equivalent of “G” in the US) featured a comment from one person who described Watership Down as a “one-way ticket to post-traumatic stress disorder” without any hint of irony. You can also find, if you scroll through other comments, that Watership Down comes up again and again.
I agree the film should not have been rated U, even by 1978 standards. An “A” classification (PG these days) would have been more appropriate. There are enough strongly disturbing images in the film — including nightmarish visions of the warren apocalypse and the bloody mauled rabbits — to make a U…
