Watership Down

Catherine Lester is Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research centres on the intersections between the horror genre and children’s culture. She is the author of the monograph Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021), as well as chapters and articles on Disney Princess films, animated horror and children’s horror television.

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Watership Down in context
Catherine Lester (University of Birmingham, UK)

Part I: Bringing the Warren to Life

1. 'We consider the conduct of this film highly unsatisfactory and unprofessional': Film finances and Watership Down
Llewella Chapman (University of East Anglia, UK) and James Chapman (University of Leicester, UK)

2. Revisiting the production of Watership Down through the Arthur Humberstone Animation Archive
Klive Humberstone (Independent Researcher, UK), Nigel Humberstone (Independent Researcher, UK) and Chris Pallant (Canterbury Christ Church, UK)

3. 'Trying to Eat Grass that isn't There': Unearthing A lapine corpus in Richard Adams' Watership Down and its film adaptation
R. Grider (Independent Scholar, USA)

Part II: Animal Stories

4. Animating utopia: Aesthetic instability and the revolutionary gaze in the film adaptation of Watership Down
Lisa Mullen (University of Cambridge, UK)

5. 'Whenever They Catch You, They Will Kill You': Human-animal conflict in 1970s British children’s cinema
Noel Brown (Liverpool Hope University, UK)

6. They watered ship down: Eco-doom and ecopedagogy in adaptations of Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood
Hollie Adams (Independent researcher, UK)

7. Watership Down under: When rabbits came to Australia
Dan Torre (RMIT University, Australia) and Lienors Torre (Deakin University, Australia)

Part III: Aesthetics of Sound and Image

8. 'English pastoral melodies': the traditions and connotations of Angela Morley’s musical score for Watership Down
Paul Mazey (Independent Scholar, UK)

9. 'I know now. A terrible thing is coming': Watership Down, music and/as horror
Leanne Weston (University of Warwick, UK)

10. Pastel dreams and crimson nightmares: Colour, aesthetics and Watership Down
Carolyn Rickards (Independent Scholar, UK)

11. Prince with a thousand faces: Shifting art-styles and the depiction of violence in Watership Down
Sam Summers (Middlesex University, UK)

Part IV: Affective Encounters with the Rabbit

12. Drawing blood: The forms and ethics of animated violence in Watership Down
Josh Schulze (University of Michigan, USA)

13. 'Won’t somebody please think of the bunnies?': Watership Down, rabbit horror and 'suitability' for children
Catherine Lester (University of Birmingham, UK)

14. Mourning Hazel-rah
Catherine Sadler (Independent Scholar, UK)

Guide to Further Research
Index