Most critics regard Watership Down as a rare thing: a British animated film that treats death, tyranny and the brutality of the countryside without flinching, and is admired for exactly that. The praise clusters on the watercolour animation, the score and the film’s refusal to soften the novel’s violence for a young audience. Several reviews note that it still frightens children, and most count that as a virtue rather than a flaw. The voice cast is mentioned approvingly more than once.
The reservations are fewer and mostly about audience: Radio Times finds the film hard to place, too dark for the certificate it carries and better suited to readers of the book than to children. The one outright dissent is Time Out, which finds the animation crude, the camerawork flat and the famous voices turning the whole thing into a radio play. The spread is otherwise narrow and warm.