Announcing the May Retrospective
At the end of my last post, I teased a retrospective for the month of May since my birthday falls in that month, and I want to do a series of essays talking about a fictional work that had a significant impact on me during my formative years. In my blog entry about The Divine Conspiracy, I mentioned that I was a bit slow to discover the wonders of fictional literature. There were plenty of novels assigned to me by my English classes that I thoroughly enjoyed (The Outsiders, The Hobbit, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Lord of the Flies, Fahrenheit 451, and probably some others that escape me now).
Especially as I got into my high school years, I began to seek out novels on my own time, like The Hunger Games trilogy, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen King's The Shining, and Terry Brooks' Shannara series. But out of all the books I discovered during that period, there is only one that I can honestly say actually changed my life. That book was written by a humble British civil servant named Richard Adams, and its name was Watership Down.
Cover of the Scribner 2005 trade paperback edition, which I own a copy of
I mentioned in the "Animation Age Ghetto" essay I did a while back that I watched the 1978 film adaptation when I was around 8-10 years old after Mom rented it from a video store. I rediscovered it on YouTube during high school. It (along with Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away) woke me up to the fact that animation was more than a genre of children's entertainment, which I had been deluding myself into thinking for most of my teenage years. From there, I purchased the novel on my Amazon Kindle, as well as some of Richard Adams' other books, like Shardik and The Plague Dogs. And it shortly grew into a life-changing rabbit hole (no pun intended) that led me on a journey that ended with me deciding to become a writer myself when I attended college just a few short years later.
There are the five works from the franchise that I will be covering for this retrospective:
-The original novel, as well as the 1996 sequel Tales from Watership Down
-The 1978 film adaptation
-The 1999 children's television series
-The discography of the British punk/metal band Fall of Efrafa, whose Warren of the Snares trilogy is loosely based on the Lapine mythology presented in the books
-The 2018 Netflix miniseries
So yeah, things are going to get pretty busy over the next month, beautiful watchers. I hope you're ready to come along for the ride!
