Watership Down

[Ikiry0]

...Holy mother of god...

[ChiggyvonRichthofen]

Well... thanks for sharing that wonderful story.

I'm not sure I'd classify either one as "for children", at least not specifically. Although as violent as the movie is, the adaptation of Plague Dogs is actually a lot more grim imo.

I would. The scarring and scaring aspects of children's fiction are something that are in need in a return.

Part of childhood is experience all ranges of experiences. I bawled my eyes out over The Land Before Time and how nasty The Brave Little Toaster could be to anthropomorphic machines, but look back, I appreciate that such films could bring that out in me and help me develop.

I agree, up to a point anyway. I'd love to share Watership Down with a couple of nephews of mine, but their parents disagree. No big deal and I certainly wouldn't press them on their decision (I still get to introduce them to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other suitably nerdy stuff), but I do look back fondly at fiction that scared/troubled me as a kid.

The reason I'd hesitate to call Watership Down a children's book or movie isn't the violence per se, but more because I don't see a lot of elements that set the book apart as "for children". The reason for that assumption seems to be a) it's anthropomorphic rabbits, and b) the movie is animated. If you ignore those two factors, the book has a lot more depth and richness of theme than a lot of fantasy explicitly targeting adults.

Of course, what exactly constitutes children's fiction is a debated topic. If you define it simply as "fiction that children read", then of course it definitely is.

[Wargriffin]

In the worlds of Ed, Edd and Eddy

Trauma builds character

[aawood]

In the worlds of Ed, Edd and Eddy

Trauma builds character

From personal experience, trauma destroys character. If you're lucky enough, once you get past the trauma, then you can start to rebuild it. So yeaeeeeah, I'm going to go ahead and say maybe the 2000's cartoon with the kid who always carries a piece of 2x4 with a face on it probably shouldn't be the first port of call for profound psychological advice.

Aaaaanyway; +1 for everyone mentioning "Animal's Of Farthing Wood". While not Watership Down in name, it definitely strikes a lot of the same chords. Animals with personality, facing dangers as they try to find a new home (with humans destroying the original one), where a lot of the issues they face come out of the dangers those animals realistically have and the way they'd (mostly) really react to them, with plenty of death, terror and occasionally brutal injury along the way.

Let's put it this way: one of the biggest pages on the wiki is the "deceased characters" index. It includes 3 entries that start with the word "baby". And it still manages to be far more acceptable as a piece of children's media than Watership Down.

[SuccubusYuri]

I mean I generally agree with Don Bluth on the subject, "Kids can handle a lot, so long as there's a happy ending."

[Zoinksberg]

Regarding rescuing rabbits from a flood, I wonder if Chuck is thinking of an episode of David the Gnome. It would have been late 80's so perhaps later than he watched Nickelodeon, but there is an episode featuring rabbits trapped during a storm and needing rescued. It's called "Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere" and most importantly a scene from it was used in the opening credits, which is why it is burnt in to my mind. Right there along with that theme song.

https://youtu.be/bsdZQub7QVE?t=39
Clip is at 39 seconds

[sayla0079]

Regarding rescuing rabbits from a flood, I wonder if Chuck is thinking of an episode of David the Gnome. It would have been late 80's so perhaps later than he watched Nickelodeon, but there is an episode featuring rabbits trapped during a storm and needing rescued. It's called "Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere" and most importantly a scene from it was used in the opening credits, which is why it is burnt in to my mind. Right there along with that theme song.

https://youtu.be/bsdZQub7QVE?t=39
Clip is at 39 seconds

Thats what i was thinking too.

[Beastro]

From personal experience, trauma destroys character. If you're lucky enough, once you get past the trauma, then you can start to rebuild it. So yeaeeeeah, I'm going to go ahead and say maybe the 2000's cartoon with the kid who always carries a piece of 2x4 with a face on it probably shouldn't be the first port of call for profound psychological advice.

All that depends upon how one reacts to trauma and how that reaction helps define a person. Like when it comes to abuse, one can either work to try to stamp out that from continuing on, or one may decide to perpetuate it.

In mine it has, starting with the time in the my teens that I looked upon as "The time when my life ended" due to health issues and depression that continue to dog me. I've suffered greatly, but that has made me more mindful of suffering and how to help the world with regard to it that I don't think I would have had my life been a cushy, uneventful one.

I mean I generally agree with Don Bluth on the subject, "Kids can handle a lot, so long as there's a happy ending."

Kid's aren't dumb either. Take The Land Before Time. The saddest thing wasn't just all the adult dinosaurs dying, especially Little Foot's mom, but the ending too despite it trying to be a happy ending: The fricking movie takes place at the K-T extinction event! Every kid going to it knows dinosaurs died out. Even if the protagonists are able to survive and have a bright, shiny ending as the credits start to roll, you know in the larger scheme of things they're fucked.

I say none of this as an adult looking back on a kids film either, I was a dino nut as a kid and knew the wider picture and it's why I came back home crying over the film, just as I knew that machines in the Brave Little Toaster weren't just the machines around us, but anthropomorphic ones enduring things no living creature would be shown to suffer in a film, not even Watership Down.

With that said, they confronted me with things I appreciate, the former with the struggle to survive in a lost situation and trying to find your way in it, something relevant given that we all lose the battle with morality in the end. The latter confronted me with loss and callous treatment of things, which in the scope of the movie are living, but regarded as simple products, thrown away and destroyed without care or thought and how people may treat others that way.

Regarding rescuing rabbits from a flood, I wonder if Chuck is thinking of an episode of David the Gnome. It would have been late 80's so perhaps later than he watched Nickelodeon, but there is an episode featuring rabbits trapped during a storm and needing rescued. It's called "Rabbits, Rabbits Everywhere" and most importantly a scene from it was used in the opening credits, which is why it is burnt in to my mind. Right there along with that theme song.

https://youtu.be/bsdZQub7QVE?t=39
Clip is at 39 seconds

Now that you mention it, it fits in my mind perfectly.

Hopefully Chuck plays the video and sees if it clicks with his mind. I've had that in the past with old kids shows (ones that escape me) where I thought they were one thing and were completely different and turned out to be another, more obscure show.

Rabbits are lagomorphs, not rodents.

Lagomorphia, until relatively recently, was a part of Rodentia.

It may be one of those things that just sticks with people. Like my beloved weasels. I don't care if Skunks aren't technically weasels anymore thanks to DNA evidence, they're honourary weasels to me, damnit!

I wouldn't say that. More British willingness not to sugar-coat stuff like the Americans do, of which Disney and such are the most extreme versions. That especially to me comes up with the more keen awareness of how much it sucks to be a prey animal due to hunting past of the British compared to Americans that includes things like fox hunting and ferreting.

Bambi and The Fox and the Hound (among others) don't really suger-coat it, though. Contemporary Disney is perhaps skittish about this, but for most of its existence (up until the 1990s) not as much.

I posted that with the assumption that, like all old stories, they had to be nastier than the Disney cartoons, and I'm not surprised to see that I was correct.

With that said Britain has it's own history of sugar-coating, but it pales in comparison with America's, being most apparent in old Victorian Bowlderizing of stories. Not just "kids" ones either, he also sanitized Shakespeare and other works as well.

Of course, what exactly constitutes children's fiction is a debated topic. If you define it simply as "fiction that children read", then of course it definitely is.

I think the struggle is that the concept of children as we know today is barely 150 years old. I mean, even in the early 20th Century there still continued the practice of 13 year olds being considered as having come of age, especially when it came to service in navies. Before then they had all the rights of an adult which is why you'd see kids that young marrying, building their own houses and loafing about in pubs drinking and gambling.

Even when it came to fiction, as we see with all these old stories, things weren't held back, and I find that to be an important thing to learn from that we need to consider in our time. But I'm speaking as someone who dropped children's books increasingly as he got closer to 13, reading Michael Crichton and Tim Clancy before then.

[Maximara]

Chuck's comment of remembering a show differently reminded me of an animated film done in the realistic style. It revolved around bird that has been hunted to near extinction. The bird finds a mate but she is killed by hunters. The final scene was the bird flying off into the distance as the narrator (the only human voice in the piece) commented that 'once there were thousands, now there is only one, and soon there will be none.'

[SMAXZO]

So I was watching the Watership Down review and there was that bit that Chuck mentioned about rabbits stopping a flood...was wondering if he remembered Animals of Farthing Wood. Think Watership Down..except instead of rabbits, it's about a ragtag bunch of animals escaping after their homes was destroyed and they had to work together to find a new home...and it's a TV series rather than a movie so..you think Watership down was bad? Animals of Farthing Wood look at that and say "Hold my beer."