I originally saw this movie in grade school at a pretty young age. I don't remember much about it except that it had some slightly upsetting imagery which might explain my later love of splatter and gore movies. This is an animated kid's movie, but it's a kid's movie from 1978 so this entails scenes of cute little bunnies meeting their demise by getting their little fuzzy necks ripped out, being eaten by various predatory animals and being buried alive by those evil old human-beings. Also they fight amongst themselves against Nazi-like fascistic rabbits. The one reminder that we are actually watching a movie made for children is the presence of a comic-relief bird ridiculously voiced by Zero Mostel. This bird does at one point tell a bunny to "piss-off" so that's a bit redeeming. Overall it's pretty amazing to think that at one time something like this could have gotten produced and shown without overly sensitive moronic people having heart-attacks and protesting it over it's rougher bits. Maybe because this was made in England and all the characters have delightful British accents it gets a pass. I'm sure there's a bunch of deeper subtext in this one including metaphors for the evils of government and an obvious warning about dictatorships but I think it works as entertaining art even without thinking too hard about politics. The one negative thing is a terrible song by Art Garfunkel but besides that it's a good watch.
I got the chance to see this in a theater full of surprisingly well-behaved little kids and from what I saw none of them seemed very traumatised by it. Then again kids these days have the internet so I imagine they're a lot tougher to make cry.
This was remade as a series in 1999 but from what little bit I've seen of that it looks a little bit too Disney-fied to me.
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