Watership Down (1978)
Ending / spoiler
Directed by: Martin Rosen
Starring: John Bennett, John Hurt, Michael Graham Cox, Ralph Richardson, Richard Briers
Watership Down is saved when Hazel's team drives the dog into the evil rabbits attacking them. General Woundwart is believed to have been killed by the dog but his body is never found, so who knows? Hazel eventually grows old and dies and leaves Earth with the spirit of the rabbit prince.
Continuity mistake: The rabbits have a close encounter with some rats in a shed on the cemetery. A spade falls over. In the next shot the spade lays in a wheelbarrow.
Hazel: Lord Frith, I know you've looked after us well, and it's wrong to ask even more of you. But my people are in terrible danger, and so I would like to make a bargain with you. My life in return for theirs.
Frith: There is not a day or night that a doe offers her life for her kittens, or some honest captain of Owsla, his life for his chief. But there is no bargain: what is, is what must be.
Trivia: Occasionally the rabbits use terms which are not explained in the movie, but which are featured in Richard Adam's novel, along with their meanings. For interest, some of these are: "owsla"=a term for a selected band of rabbits responsible for both security and raiding parties (for vegetables, mostly; organization varies with the warren); "hraka"=rabbit droppings or something similarly offensive; "tharn"=mad or paralyzed with fear; "elil"=any rabbit-killing/-eating enemy; "hrududu"=generic term for motorized vehicles; "zorn" (which Holly cries out right before he joins the others near the new warren)=catastrophe; "Frith"=the sun; "Inle"=the moon, or death; "hlessi"=a wandering rabbit.
Question: I am struggling to figure out what the title of the movie, Watership Down, has to do with the movie itself at all. Can someone please explain what the title refers to?
Quantom X
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Chosen answer: Watership Down is the name of a real hill in Hampshire. In the context of the film and the book, it is the location where Fiver and the other rabbits set up their new warren after leaving Sandleford.
Sierra1