Watership Down

Martin Rosen's Watership Down adapts 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, began directing it in the mid-1970s, but his death from heart disease in 1977 left Rosen, until then a producer, to take over and finish the film himself.

The voice cast is a remarkable roster of British actors. John Hurt voices Hazel, with Richard Briers as the seer Fiver, Michael Graham Cox as the pugilist Bigwig, Ralph Richardson as the Chief Rabbit and John Bennett as Holly, plus supporting roles for Denholm Elliott, Roy Kinnear, Hannah Gordon, Zero Mostel (in his final screen credit, as Kehaar the gull) and the broadcaster Joss Ackland. Tom Bywaters supervised the cinematography. Angela Morley and Malcolm Williamson wrote the orchestral score, and Mike Batt provided the closing-credits song Bright Eyes, sung by Art Garfunkel, which was a UK number one for six weeks in 1979.

Its unusually adult tone, with violence, mortality and political authoritarianism depicted in a children's animation, set off a long argument over its U certificate from the BBFC and left a lasting mark on the British viewers who saw it as children. It turns up regularly in BFI polls of the greatest British films, and alongside the work of Aardman it is the most recognisable British animated feature of the postwar decades.