Alas, and despite a glittering cast, the new Watership Down is spectacularly ho-hum – less tooth and claw than shrug and head-shake. The biggest issue with the four-part BBC-Netflix collaboration is that nobody involved seems to have paused to consider if, commercial imperative aside, there was a good reason for remaking Watership Down – already more than adequately served by Martin Rosen’s haunting 1978 movie.
So while the performances by James McAvoy, John Boyega, Gemma Arterton, Olivia Colman, Peter Capaldi and others, are top rank, what’s lacking is a willingness to wrestle with the themes explored in the novel – in particular Adams’s pessimistic view of animal (and by implication human) nature.
Because that’s the real problem with the new Watership Down: it simply isn’t scary enough. Where Rosen’s film was cobbled together on a shoe-string outside the studio system, this new version is very much a product for mass dissemination – and, thus by necessity, lacks the visceral knife-twisting of the earlier movie.
It’s breezy and fast-paced and, no matter how hairy the predicament in which the rabbits find themselves, entirely without menace. Even big baddie General Woundwort (Ben Kingsley) is comparatively cuddly – closer to a traditional Disney villain such as Scar from The Lion King than an milky-eyed avatar of evil to stalk your nightmares.
One glaring misstep is the cheap-looking CGI animation. Neither as realistic as Disney or Pixar nor as spare and elegant as the 1978 film, the new Watership Down is drab with a vengeance. Which is extraordinary considering the rumoured £20 million budget.
Nobody is suggesting the BBC should explicitly set out to unsettle unsuspecting viewers and no doubt there would be an outcry if Watership Down arrived slathered in buckets of blood. But without the darkness is Watership Down really Watership Down? And if you take away that malice and melancholy, what’s left? It’s a question the new adaptation never gets around to answering.