Meh...my kid was gonna get traumatized by something. Might as well be this.JK, she loved it! And we'd already read the book, so it was fun to point out the familiar characters.
Richard Adams' elegiac and peril-frought opus about a colony of rabbits gets an admirably respectful and compact adaptation from writer/producer/director Martin Rosen, for whom this was a passion project. Rosen's script is a broad strokes version of the story, yet thanks to Adams' extraordinarily strong narrative, viewers won't feel short-changed. Sure, we lose some rich backstory here and there, but it's a classic fable with a quest, heroes, and villains, voiced by acting royalty like John Hurt, Ralph Richardson, Roy Kinnear, Nigel Hawthorne, and Denholm Elliott.
The animation is somber and haunting and the violence, which has often been cited as being far too graphic for a so-called 'children's film' is beautifully realized. My only complaint is a musical interlude sung by Art Garfunkel. It's well-intentioned, but dates it badly and could easily have been accomplished with an instrumental score in half the time. Otherwise, a marvelously adult adaptation of a book written for mature kids.
תגובות