'Whenever They Catch You, They Will Kill You': Human-Animal Conflict in 1970s British Children's Cinema

Brown, Noel (2023) 'Whenever They Catch You, They Will Kill You': Human-Animal Conflict in 1970s British Children's Cinema. In: Watership Down: Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence. Animation: Key Films/Filmmakers . Bloomsbury, New York, pp. 89-102. ISBN 9781501376993

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Abstract

Beaten to death with a shovel; bludgeoned by poachers; torn to pieces by a hound; devastated by mechanical diggers. These are the fates that befall the animal protagonists of several of the most iconic British children’s films of the 1960s and 1970s. The four films discussed in this chapter, Ring of Bright Water (Couffer, 1969), The Belstone Fox (Hill, 1973), Watership Down (Rosen, 1978) and Tarka the Otter (Cobham, 1979), foreground bleak, often realist evocations of human–animal conflict that contrast sharply with the sentimentalism of mainstream Hollywood animal films, particularly those produced by Disney. Today, however, most of these films have slipped out of the popular consciousness. If they are remembered at all, it tends to be with a vague combination of nostalgia and something approaching dread, as relics of a less consumerist era of British children’s media culture and as loci of childhood trauma. In this chapter, I would like to situate Watership Down in the context of the broader preoccupation with animals and nature in British children’s cinema of the period.[1] Between the late 1960s and late 1970s, the animal film was the most important British children’s film cycle. The four films discussed in this chapter are linked by recurrent features: an emphasis on an ultimately ungovernable, untameable nature; humankind figured as an intrusive and destructive force, diametrically opposed to the ‘natural’ order; a tendency both to embrace and to repudiate anthropomorphism and sentimentality; punctuating moments of brutal realism; and implicit or explicit criticisms of modernity.

Item Type:	Book Section
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Creative and Performing Arts
Depositing User:	Noel Brown
Date Deposited:	25 Oct 2024 10:22
Last Modified:	25 Oct 2024 10:23
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4396

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