Bright Eyes, sung by Art Garfunkel,
is from one of my favorite animated movies,
Watership Down, from the book by
Richard Adams. It is used during the sequence where
Hazel, the lead rabbit,
voiced by John Hurt, has been shot by a hunter and lies near death.
Bright Eyes, burning like fire,
Bright Eyes, how can you close and
fail,
How can the light that burns so
brightly,
Suddenly burn so pale?
It always brings a tear.
He survives to lead the rabbits who
escaped with him from a warren ruled by the evil
Woundwort to a new warren, a
free warren, in the Watership Down.
The rabbits are voice by a veritable
who’s who of English character actors, John Hurt,
Richard Briers, Ralph
Richardson, Denholm Elliot, Harry Andrews, and American Zero Mostel,
as a
Russian seagull.
I remember reading somewhere (I
think it was Smithsonian magazine back in the
1990’s, but I cannot find it)
that it was written as an allegory about World War II and the fight
against
totalitarianism.
This was the third movie I rented
from Fotomat, the first video tape rental outfit, after
Days of Heaven and
Harold and Maude.
I
also saw it on a large screen at a theater in Hanover Park, long gone, in a
double feature with Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings animated feature, which
covered only about a half of the 3 books in a 133 minute film. Both were
released in 1978. The Bakshi film was rotoscoped, he took live action footage,
removed the detail, then drew and filled in the outline of the figures. I was
not impressed.
It
took another 20 years, and a great advancement in CGI, along with a great
director in Peter Jackson, to truly bring the Lord of the Rings to life. I have
never read the Ring Trilogy, but enjoyed the films when they came out.
