Watership Down

Martin Rosen's Watership Down is the animated adaptation of Richard Adams's 1972 novel of the same name, which had won the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and become an unexpected international bestseller. John Hubley, the celebrated American animator behind the Mr. Magoo cartoons, had begun directing the film in the mid-1970s, but Hubley's death from heart disease in 1977 left Rosen — until then a producer — to take over and complete the production himself.

The voice cast assembled an extraordinary roster of British actors. John Hurt voices the rabbit Hazel, with Richard Briers as the seer Fiver, Michael Graham Cox as the pugilist Bigwig, Ralph Richardson as the Chief Rabbit, John Bennett as Holly, and supporting roles for Denholm Elliott, Roy Kinnear, Hannah Gordon, Zero Mostel (in his final screen credit, voicing Kehaar the gull) and the broadcaster Joss Ackland. Cinematography supervision is by Tom Bywaters; Angela Morley and Malcolm Williamson scored the orchestral underscore, while Mike Batt provided the closing-credits song Bright Eyes, performed by Art Garfunkel — a UK number-one for six weeks in 1979.

The film's unusually adult tone — its depiction of violence, mortality and political authoritarianism in the form of a children's animation — sparked extended debate over its U-rating from the BBFC and led to lasting cultural memory among British viewers who saw it as children. It is regularly cited in BFI polls of the greatest British films and remains, alongside the work of Aardman, the most recognisable native UK animated feature of the postwar decades.