Watership Down now rated PG after 45 years of giving children nightmares

Simon Kelly

It should be rated at least 12 in our opinion…

One of the most terrifying children’s movies of all time, the 1978 animated flick Watership Down, has finally been bumped from a U rating to PG.

Notorious for being one of the most gruesome animated flicks ever aimed at kids, it is no longer deemed suitable for all children and has been re-rated for containing “mild violence, threat, brief bloody images and bad language”.

Released 45 years ago, Watership Down focuses on a group of rabbits who set out to find a new home after their warren is put under threat by property developers. Over the 90 minutes, we see a lot of bloodshed – a far cry from any Disney flick – including rabbits getting their throats ripped out, getting caught in barbed wire and, to literally add insult to injury, getting told to “piss off” by a seagull.

However, it was somehow rated Universal for all this time and is retrospectively deemed to have traumatised an entire generation.

Watership Down

Watership Down now rated PG after 45 years of giving children nightmares

The rating reclassification comes from the British Board of Film Classification’s annual report, which notes, “Whenever a distributor resubmits a film with an existing BBFC rating to us, we review it under our current guidelines. This sometimes means we may reclassify the film at either a higher rating or a lower rating than it was under previous guidelines.”

Referencing a “distressing sequence” in the film, the report says: “In their exile, the rabbits meet various challenges, some of which result in bloody bite and claw injuries caused by animals fighting.

“In one scene, a bird tells one of the rabbits to ‘piss off'”.

“When we viewed the film under the current guidelines we reclassified it PG in line with our current policies for violence, threat, injury detail and language,” it added.

Watership Down was adapted from the bestselling novel by Richard Adams and used the voices of John Hurt and Richard Briers. In 2018, Netflix made their own, much more family-friendly adaptation, starring a voice cast of James McEvoy, Olivia Colman, Nicholas Hoult and John Boyega.

However, it’s the original that will last longer in our hearts and minds, and we still can’t hear Bright Eyes by Art Garfunkel without getting a shiver down our spine and some traumatic flashbacks to boot.