YMMV / Watership Down (2018)

• Awesome Music: Sam Smith's "Fire on Fire", a hauntingly gorgeous song that beautifully taps into the story's themes of fear, hope, love, and friendship.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Efrafan does busting out in an Irish lament to distract their captors just as Bigwig is outed as a mole. Being almost like a musical number, it is never brought up again and seems to only be in the film so that Emeli Sande can contribute to the soundtrack.
• Questionable Casting:
  • Most of the voice actors are spot-on, but seriously, Peter Capaldi as Kehaar? Not helped by Capaldi using his natural Scottish accent instead of putting on a Norwegian one.
  • Since it was announced, many fans of the book questioned the decision to cast John Boyega as Bigwig, due to him being deemed too young and high-pitched for a character commonly portrayed as grizzled and experienced. In the miniseries itself, Boyega does manage to do a deeper voice for the character, but can sound as if he is trying to sound older and tougher than he actually is, which sounds unintentionally hilarious at times.
  • Sir Ben Kingsley as Woundwort. As talented and respected he is as an actor, and despite how well he did in playing the callous and cruel side to the character's nature, Kingsley does not bring to the voice the nasty level of viciousness and bloodlust that Harry Andrews and John Hurt famously did for their incarnations.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus is that the series' talented voice cast and good script are let down by questionable directional decisions and the awkward animation.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The crows in episode 1 don't really 'fly' as much as they awkwardly 'float'.
  • Especially in wide shots, the rabbits often run in a jerky artificial manner seemingly disconnected from the background; many reviewers compared the effect unfavorably to video games from the early 2000s.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Many fans felt that the series' attempts to tone down the infamously traumatising violence of the original film made the action scenes feel weightless and unintentionally silly.
  • The franchise's Signature Song "Bright Eyes" is completely absent from the film.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The backgrounds are photo-realistic and fluid, which makes the jerky character animation all the more jarring. So does the fact that the rabbits all have human eyes (to give them eye color and help differentiate them).

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