hares
and hounds:
watership down
the plague dogs |
director/screenwriter
Martin Rosen
based on
the novel by
Richard Adams
producer
Martin Rosen
animation
supervisor
Philip Duncan
director
of animation
Tony Guy
music
Angela Morley
Marcus Dods
editor
Terry Rawlings
cast (voices)
John Hurt (Hazel)
Richard Briers (Fiver)
Michael Graham Cox (Bigwig)
John Bennett (Holly)
Ralph Richardson (Chief Rabbit)
Simon Cadell (Blackberry)
Terence Rigby (Silver)
Roy Kinnear (Pipkin)
Richard O'Callaghan (Dandelion)
Denholm Elliott (Cowslip)
Lynn Farleigh (Cat)
Mary Maddox (Clover)
Zero Mostel (Kehaar)
Harry Andrews (General Woundwort)
Hannah Gordon (Hyzenthlay)
Nigel Hawthorne (Campion)
Clifton Jones (Blackavar)
Derek Griffiths (Vervain)
Michael Hordern (Frith)
Joss Ackland (Black Rabbit)
Michelle Price (Lucy)
mpaa rating: PG
running
time: 92m
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
director/screenwriter
Martin Rosen
based on
the novel by
Richard Adams
producer
Martin Rosen
director
of animation
Tony Guy
music
Patrick Gleeson
editor
Richard Harkness
cast
John Hurt (Snitter)
Christopher Benjamin (Rowf)
James Bolam (The Tod)
Nigel Hawthorne (Dr. Robert Boycott)
Warren Mitchell (Tyson/Wag)
Judy Geeson (Pekinese)
Patrick Stewart (Major)
mpaa rating: PG
running
time: 99m
video
availability: VHS
|
Two
animated films about talking rabbits and talking dogs. Kid stuff?
Don't bet on it.
As many fans know, 1978's Watership Down is not only not
a kiddie movie, it boasts a good deal more maturity and depth
than most live-action movies for adults. The same is also true
of 1982's The Plague Dogs, which is, if anything, even
more grim than Watership Down. The two movies are proper
companion pieces for several reasons. Both are based on novels
by Richard Adams, who is basically in the same boat with Anthony
Burgess: British author of many novels, forever identified with
only one. Both come from the same filmmaking team: writer-director
Martin Rosen, animation director Tony Guy. Both contain some
of the finest detail you'll ever see in an animated feature.
At least two noted British actors lend their voices to both --
John Hurt and Nigel Hawthorne.
However, while most people are familiar with Watership Down
-- if you haven't read the book, you've probably caught the movie
on video or TV -- almost no one outside Adams die-hards and animation
buffs has even heard of The Plague Dogs. Both movies deserve
to be seen and cherished, but The Plague Dogs needs your
attention more urgently: It has languished in obscurity long
enough.
A fable of fettered souls yearning for freedom, Watership
Down has long been burdened with sociopolitical meaning that
Adams himself never intended (or so he has said). A young, fearful
rabbit named Fiver has been having troubling visions of impending
doom. "The field is covered in blood," he whimpers,
and we see that, sure enough, blood is everywhere. This, in case
you were wondering, is your first clue that this isn't a Disney
toon. Hardly anyone in Sandleford Warren takes Fiver seriously
except his brother Hazel. These are very British rabbits; in
one of my favorite moments, when Fiver is jabbering about his
visions, we overhear a bemused rabbit muttering "What's
he on about?"
Fiver's visions, it turns out, are real: Sandleford is soon to
be bulldozed to make way for a housing development. So Fiver,
Hazel, and a few other believers -- including Bigwig, a former
member of the warren's "owsla" (paramilitary group)
-- set off for points unknown. They have to trust in the intuitions
of Fiver, who knows only that Sandleford is unsafe and that there
is a better place ahead -- a high place of rolling hills, devoid
of mankind. That place is Watership Down. Once there, they realize
they don't have any does (females) with them, and a few of them
go to a nearby farm to liberate some. In the course of their
journey, the rabbits run across two other warrens: an odd place
where the rabbits have good food but suspiciously empty burrows,
and a fascist warren run by the fearsome General Woundwort. Scholars
of the book have suggested that the rabbits in these latter warrens
are doomed because they have abandoned Frith, the god of creation
in the rabbits' mythology; they've abandoned spirituality in
favor of personal gain (food) or power (the Efrafa warren run
by Woundwort with the help of vicious owsla).
Richard Adams, who like so many authors began Watership Down
as a story told to his children, put a lot of lapine mythology
into his novel. Devotees of the book say this is where the movie
version falls short. It has room only for the basic quest --
the dangers, the escapes, the battles, the strategies. My feeling
is that the book is the book and the movie is the movie, and
that if you want the mythology, it's there in Adams' book and
its 1996 sequel Tales from Watership Down. The movie still
retains the vivid characterization of the novel, as well as the
incidents that have sparked so much speculation. And it's beautifully
realized -- a rainbow of muted colors and perfect voice casting.
John Hurt is the voice of the sensible Hazel, Richard Briars
the nervous visionary Fiver, Ralph Richardson the imposing Chief
Rabbit, Denholm Elliott the snooty Cowslip -- who lives in the
warren that fans have come to call the Warren of Shining Wires.
A potentially discordant note is the loud seagull Kehaar, voiced
by the loud Zero Mostel. Kehaar sometimes comes perilously close
to being the Jar Jar Binks of Watership Down, but the
difference is that he's funny when he's supposed to be, and helpful
when he needs to be.
All told, the movie is an excellent and unsoftened take on the
novel, though I regret the pacing that sometimes makes it feel
like a TV movie; there are a few too many fades to black where
it seems a commercial should go. There's a musical interlude
set to the song "Bright Eyes" (sung by Art Garfunkel)
that's subtle enough -- at least it's not a pull-out-the-stops
Disney number -- but also runs on a bit. Otherwise, all these
years later, this is the same movie I fell in love with as a
kid. The villains are genuinely frightening; I'd put Woundwort
up against anyone whose name begins with Darth, and the crosscutting
in the climax -- Bigwig vs. Woundwort, while a hungry dog decimates
most of the Efrafa owsla -- has it all over the similar climax
in Phantom
Menace. The grim, brutal moments stand out more in memory,
but actually a good deal of the film is hopeful and almost idyllic.
Watership Down has gotten a somewhat tarnished "too
intense for younger children" rep, and it does have its
moments of abrupt, unforgiving violence when some of the characters
meet the Black Rabbit of Inlé a lot sooner than they ever
wanted to. When the rabbits are slashed, they bleed, and when
they die, they go out with eyes open and tongues lolling out.
But it really doesn't tell children anything they can't handle;
hell, even Bambi showed kids that nature is cruel and
man is the ugliest predator. They might as well learn it young.
There is an actual Watership Down, the Hampshire/Berkenshire
region located west of London; the land surrounding it is owned
by Andrew Lloyd Webber. In recent years, according to reports,
the rabbits in the real-life Watership Down have multiplied and
dug too many holes in what is essentially an agricultural area.
The government came up with a plan to discourage the rabbits:
mass extermination by gassing.
That's a real-life denouement worthy of The Plague Dogs,
which would also get -- and deserve -- the "too intense
for younger children" rep, if it were well-known enough
to have a rep. The film begins not on the sun-bathed English
countryside (as did Watership Down) but in darkness, with
a mournful, echoing gospel-type song with lyrics like "Not
gonna feel the pain no more." We also hear splashing. We
fade in, and we're inside a secret government animal experimentation
lab in the middle of a British national park. A noble black labrador
is swimming in a huge water tank; exhausted, he slips under the
water and bumps the bottom. A hook fishes him out, and he's brought
back to consciousness with electroshock paddles. This dog --
called Rowf -- is part of a water-immersion experiment to see
how long a dog can swim before he drowns. Welcome to The Plague
Dogs. It's not a fun movie. Nor is it meant to be.
Adams wrote his book, he has said, as a dark satire on animal
testing, government, and the media. (In the book, the name of
the lab site is Animal Research, Surgical and Experimental --
a sly pun for British readers: check the initials.) When the
door to Rowf's cell is left ajar, he escapes with a fellow inmate
-- Snitter, a jittery little dog with a bandage on his head (from
recent tampering with his brain). The dogs roam the bleak, rocky
countryside, more or less unprepared for life in the wild. Rowf
is a cynical, tired old dog who can't take any more immersion
tests by the "whitecoats" -- he figures he's going
to die out in the wild, but he'd rather die there than in the
tank. Snitter is a bit like Fiver; he has hallucinations of his
former life as a house pet, and he wants to find a loving master
so he can sit by the fire and be petted and cared for. The dogs
are sighted here and there, and after a truly shocking and bloody
incident that spells out in neon that this is not a movie
for kids, the government redoubles its efforts to capture and
destroy Rowf and Snitter. To prevent any citizens from being
heroes and catching the dogs themselves -- or from taking pity
on the mutts and sheltering them, for that matter -- the government
feeds the British papers the official lie that the dogs may be
carrying fleas infected with bubonic plague.
John Hurt returns here as the voice of Snitter, joined by the
gruff Christopher Benjamin as Rowf. In due time, the dogs run
across a fox named Tod, voiced by James Bolam as a schemer full
of plots and immensely satisfying invective the way only the
British can deliver it -- "You bleedin' great sod"
and so on. (In human roles, you can hear Nigel Hawthorne as Dr.
Boycott, the head of the experiment lab, and Patrick Stewart
as an army major.) The two Adams movies gave John Hurt the opportunity
to play both ends of the spectrum: as Hazel, he was the level-headed
one, and as Snitter he gets to suffer and complain about the
cobwebs in his skull. There's a surface similarity between the
Hazel/Fiver team and the Rowf/Snitter team, but Rowf isn't the
thinker that Hazel was, and the dogs have no real game plan.
The rabbits were escaping from one place towards the paradise
in Fiver's visions; the dogs are just escaping, and the only
paradise in Snitter's visions is the one in his past, the one
he can never have again.
Somewhere near the middle, after the dogs have passed the point
of no return, there's a brilliant circling shot of Rowf on a
hill howling at the moon. The whole movie is shot through with
despair and dread; it feels like a prolonged howl of helplessness.
The Plague Dogs, I think, actually has a smaller body
count than Watership Down, but it establishes its bleak
tone in the first moments and never lightens up; the closest
thing to comic relief here is Tod, but he's no Kehaar -- he's
not allowed to break the dark mood. This is a movie that shows
you a cute little dog lying in its cell, motionless, quite dead;
a custodian strolls by, says something like "Right, here's
another one," and scoops the carcass up with a shovel. The
sound of the shovel scraping the concrete floor is the final
ugly touch of realism.
Perhaps moments like that were part of why the movie fell through
the cracks. It's too grim for kids, and most adults will look
at it, see that it's a cartoon with talking dogs, assume it's
something like All Dogs Go to Heaven, and pass on it.
Unlike Watership Down, which can be marketed and enjoyed
as family entertainment, The Plague Dogs is made of nastier,
more upsetting stuff. Watership Down can be viewed at
an interpretive distance -- ah, it's a fable about society and
the folly of systems built on force and hatred. The Plague
Dogs is a little too uncomfortably real, because Richard
Adams didn't put anything in his book that hadn't actually been
perpetrated on lab animals, and it continues to this day. Maybe,
too, the movie was punished for being too political: Show this
to kids, and they might grow up to be activists. Whatever the
reason -- and though I love Watership Down -- my sympathies
lie with the underdogs, so to speak. The movie has a dark beauty,
with an ending that's simultaneously depressing and transcendent,
and the fact that The Plague Dogs remains largely obscure
is a crime. |
