Reviews

Watership Down was immensely controversial on release, in large part due to rating agencies failing to comprehend that an adventure film with talking animals might not be intended for young children - in what it later acknowledged as its most criticized move ever, the BBFC gave the film a 'U', equivalent to the American G-rating. While the graphic violence in several scenes garnered much attention, I think the more notable frequent source of childhood trauma, which also happens to be the reason I love the film so much, is its acknowledgement that all its characters are going to die. This is not a spoiler, as I am speaking less of dramatic irony than the reality that all living things die eventually. Even if they survive the events of the film, which is by no means assured due to the film's palpable stakes, they will eventually die of old age or disease. And so, by extension, will the audience.

I do not mean to portray Watership Down as a nihilistic screed - quite the opposite. The film attempts to help the viewer find meaning in their own mortality. The story provides the characters' lives with a sense of purpose even as it emphasizes their transience. But many parents like to pretend when dealing with young children that their lives, and the lives of their family members, will go on forever. Children aren't stupid and see through this screen, even if they play along with the act, but the belief that they can't handle such subject matter makes the acknowledgement of the inevitability of death in a film marketed to younger audiences controversial. This is unfortunate, as such an examination of the hard realities of life and death might alleviate some children's anxiety surrounding the subject.

As a vessel to examine this central subject, and to touch on many others including environmentalism, totalitarianism, and freedom, Richard Adams's novel, and by extension Martin Rosen's film, tells an engaging story about a party of likeable rabbits, voiced by some of the top English actors of the time, journeying in search of a new home. Even ignoring the allegorical elements, Oscar-worthy soundtrack, and star-studded cast, this tale is uncommonly well-told. Even the minor characters have an identifiable personality, in part due to the clever adaptation of the brilliant source material, in part due to the efforts of the voice actors, and in part due to the efforts of the animators. The antagonistic rabbit-despot General Woundwort looks menacing despite being from a breed of animal we routinely allow children to hold at a petting zoo or eat in a stew for lunch. And both the dialogue and the animation acknowledge that the characters are animals rather than people with tails. Their movements are distinctly leporine, and they don't understand the human world in the same way animals in most animated movies do. Hence the focus on death - the life of a rabbit, a short-lived creature near the bottom of the food chain, is so fragile and precarious that, if endowed with human intelligence, they would have an extremely acute sense of mortality.

A 1987 study in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology found that watching Akira Kurosawa's 1952 film Ikiru might alleviate a person's anxiety about death. While Watership Down was not mentioned in the study, I suspect watching it could have a similar effect. The film's bittersweet lessons about the realities of life and death are not entirely dissimilar from those depicted in Kurosawa's masterwork, although the films differ heavily in other ways. Roger Ebert suggested that Ikiru was one of the few films that might inspire someone to change how they live their life. I'm not sure that Watership Down quite accomplishes that feat, but it might make someone reconsider their view of death.

I have a friend who views watching terrible films as a perfect social activity. This can be quite enjoyable at times, as many of the films we watch together provide numerous opportunities for MST3K-style commentary. A couple of years ago, I chose to watch Foodfight! with him while he was over my place. I had heard that this was one of the worst animated films ever made and I thought that it would be a source of much schadenfreude. After an awkward hour-and-a-half, I realized that I was mistaken - Threshold Entertainment has managed to produce a film that's so incompetent on so many levels that it's almost unwatchable.

The most glaring flaw with the film is the animation. The computer animation in Foodfight! looks worse than animation made on a much lower budget 15 or 20 years before this film was released. The character models range from unappealing to horrifying and some of them are reused multiple times in the same shot, with crowds of people consisting of the same five or so character models repeated dozens of times. Apparently, the original assets for the film were stolen, forcing the film crew to recreate what was lost on a much lower budget, so they weren't entirely to blame for this aspect of the film's awfulness.

Those involved in the film's creation don't get a similar pass for the writing. The plot is riddled with so many clichés that you could hang Dex's fedora on them. For example, Dex is the character who was once a detective but left the profession after the woman he loved disappeared, a stock protagonist so generic that even Ballistic: Ecks vs Sever included him. The humor is equally bland, consisting of fart jokes, bad puns, and sexual innuendos that seem rather inappropriate for a children's movie.

A large part of the controversy surrounding the film's release was the rampant product placement. While I found the product placement a minor quibble compared to the film's other glaring flaws, I understand the concern - Foodfight! is ostensibly aimed at children, and they are more susceptible to being influenced by product placement. However, I found the greatest disappointment surrounding the inclusion of brand mascots, called "Ikes" in the film, is that they don't do much other than stand in the background of some shots. I was hoping to see Mr. Clean use his navy training to beat the villains senseless, but the only action scene involving the Ikes was a brief scene near the end, where they throw food at the Brand X soldiers.

The real tragedy of Foodfight! is that it is not even "so bad it's good". Foodfight! could have easily been enjoyably bad, but it commits the cardinal sin of being both bad and bland. I could even see a version of Foodfight! that I would enjoy unironically - a move that embraced the absurdity of the premise and was written in a way that was more self-aware. Foodfight! was never going to be Citizen Kane, but it could have been Robocop - a movie that used its rather silly premise to deliver some clever social commentary. However, the version we got is neither of these things.