Bloody bunnies on the small screen: Adapting Watership Down for children's television

Television adaptations of Richard Adams’ 1972 novel Watership Down are useful case studies for examining how violent material for children is presented in different media. The first screen adaptation of the novel, Martin Rosen’s 1978 animated film, is notorious for ‘traumatising’ children because the child-friendly connotations of its anthropomorphic rabbits clash with its sequences of bloody violence. The 1999 CITV/YTV and 2018 BBC/Netflix television adaptations modulate violence in order to avoid the controversy of the film, but they have not left as large a cultural footprint, raising questions around the role of violence in Watership Down and how expectations of violence in children’s media are managed through promotion and distribution. In analysing the approach to violence in child- and family-oriented television adaptations of Watership Down, this article draws attention to the valuable role of television in the ongoing legacy of this classic text, and in children’s encounters with horror more broadly.