The Daily Stream: Watership Down is the most intense cartoon bunnies movie you'll ever see

Unlike Disney's "Bambi" and the works of Don Bluth, "Watership Down" makes no effort to soften the brutality of nature, let alone humanity's blind disregard for other living things. (“Men have always hated us,” one rabbit says at one point. “No — they just destroyed the warren because we were in their way,” replies another.) The animals in the film still possess an element of stylization but are otherwise realistic in their features, with distinctly inhuman facial expressions and physical builds. At times, however, Rosen and his animators forgo realism entirely in favor of abstraction, allowing them to depict the horrors of rabbits being killed by predators or buried alive in their burrows in an agonizingly nightmarish way without being overly graphic. .

Another thing that sets "Watership Down" apart from similar animated films is that it doesn't completely anthropomorphize its heroes. In its pleasingly stylized prologue, the creation myth dreamed up by the film's rabbits is told through moving hieroglyphics, but it never explicitly parallels that of any religion or human mythology. Nor, for that matter, do rabbits or any other creature come to view the world as a person would when it comes to their understanding of logic, gender, or even the laws of physics. Instead, "Watership Down" probably comes closer than any other movie to correctly imagining what it might be like to actually exist as an animal in our confusing reality.