To bean, or not to bean? On rabbit toes and lessons from Watership Down

With Watership Down (Martin Rosen, 1978) newly restored in 4K by the British Film Institute, it’s an appropriate time to reflect on rabbits in animation. From Bugs Bunny to the recent Peter Rabbit films (Will Gluck, 2018-2021), rabbits can be found everywhere within the history of animation. But animation also has a problem with representing these bob-tailed creatures. I was crudely reminded of this about two-thirds into DreamWorks’ latest animated release, The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024), when something caught my eye that briefly took me out of the film. The film is set on a remote island inhabited only by the titular robot and an assortment of wildlife, including a rabbit or two. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment approaching the film’s final act, one of the rabbits raises their front paws, revealing soft pink pads on the undersides of their feet.

Fig. 1 - Bambi's Thumper.

What was it about the brief and seemingly innocuous gesture that I found so distracting? Rabbit caretakers, fans, or even the very superstitious will understand what is wrong with the picture described above: the issue is that unlike other popular mammals like cats and dogs, rabbits do not have pads – colloquially known as toe beans – on their feet. The sole of a rabbit’s foot is smooth, flat, and covered with a thick layer of fur. And yet, it is an oft-repeated error in animation that rabbits are depicted with toe beans, perhaps the most famous and egregious example being Thumper in Disney’s Bambi (David Hand, 1942) (Fig. 1). The irony for Thumper is that the shock-absorbing quality of toe beans would most likely muffle the thumping that gives the rabbit his name.

The Wild Robot’s director, Chris Sanders, cites Bambi as a stylistic influence (Radulovic 2014). Both films anthropomorphise their animal characters to an extent, through painterly, hyperreal aesthetics that strive toward verisimilitude and plausibility (see Wells 1998). Within the hyperreal rubric, Bambi and The Wild Robot represent animals quite accurately in anatomical terms, while also affording some leniency in terms of expressivity to enable the (human) audience to engage emotionally with the animals’ plights. This makes the addition of toe beans to the undersides of rabbits’ feet stand out as an especially strange aesthetic choice and/or mistake. This is not a tendency that is limited to hyperreal animated styles either: animated rabbits across the medium’s mimesis-abstraction spectrum (Furniss 2007), from Over the Moon’s (Glen Keane, 2020) supporting bunnies to even Bugs Bunny himself have these podal embellishments (Fig. 2). I am hard-pressed to think of another animal that is so often represented in visual culture with a body part that simply does not exist (beyond the usual anthropomorphic additions animated animals tend to be subjected to – eyelashes, fingers, breast-like curves on females, and the like). On the other hand, just as diverse a selection of films get rabbit feet right – i.e. beanless – including the aforementioned Peter Rabbit films, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), and Watership Down. In this blog post, I want to explore why the inconsistent appearance of the seemingly unimportant toe bean is representative of broader issues in animation when it comes to representing rabbits, the implications these issues have for real life rabbits, and what we can learn from the newly restored Watership Down about our lagomorph friends.

Fig. 2 - Bugs Bunny showing off his beans in What's Opera, Doc? (1957).

The impulse to add anatomically incorrect toe beans to cartoon rabbits is a symptom of two interrelated issues: First, the tendency within animation to not just anthropomorphise, but cutify, animated animals, and especially rabbits. Real rabbits are cute. They just are. It’s difficult not to see a pair of long ears, white fluffy tail, and twitchy nose and to feel differently (although I know that a small minority of people, chief among them Jordan Peele, do not share this affection for bunnies, hence the use of rabbits as creepy mise-en-scène in his film Us [2019]). Cartoon rabbits hardly need much embellishment for their cuteness to translate, and yet many animated rabbits are nevertheless adorned with feminising or child-like features like large eyes framed by very long eyelashes. It follows that toe beans, which are a notoriously cute feature of real cats and dogs, become part of the cutifying of cartoon rabbits. And yet even animated rabbits that are not especially ‘cute’ have beans as part of their design, as is the case with Bugs Bunny or the rabbit in Pixar’s computer-animated short Presto (Doug Sweetland, 2008). Clearly, the desire to enhance cuteness is not the only culprit here.

This brings me to the second issue, which is that the beaning impulse is also symptomatic of a socio-cultural misunderstanding of rabbit anatomy, rabbit needs, and rabbit characteristics in general. In other words, cartoon rabbits with toe beans are simply a result of the fact that a lot of people just don’t know very much about rabbits, especially in comparison with more popular ‘beaned’ furry critters, i.e. cats and dogs. In their cultural history of rabbits Stories Rabbits Tell, Susan Davis and Margo Demello point to the conflicting attitudes to real and fictional rabbits that occur due to this lack of awareness:

Real rabbits have traditionally served as both childhood pet and family meal, as both highly prized show animal and hunted pest. In “texts” that range from ancient myths and stories to motion picture images and fuzzy slippers, imaginary rabbits have been portrayed as both innocent and sexual, clever and stupid, timid and brave. The fact that one animals occupies so many contradictory positions in our popular imagination both reflects and shapes the ways that we have viewed and treated rabbits throughout history, for good or for ill” (2003, 130).

They go on to suggest that “Commercially available rabbity items reflect a worldview that sees rabbits as simple, innocent creatures fit for a child – or lustful, sexy breeding machines. Neither view accurately portrays the real behaviours or lives of real rabbits” (ibid., 223).

This intersection of the popularity of the idea of rabbits with inaccurate representation occurs in parallel with dire situations facing real rabbits, with nearly a quarter of domestic rabbits living in inadequate housing or being fed incorrect diets (PDSA 2024). Incidentally, one of the few things cartoons get right about rabbits is their love of carrots, but they should only eat them as an occasional treat due to their high sugar content. In fact, so little is known about rabbits compared with other domesticated mammals that, in many places, rabbits are considered exotic pets requiring specialist veterinary treatment, despite also ranking in the top 5 of the most popular pets in the UK (Petplan 2018). The conditions of domestic rabbits in the UK are urgent enough that commercial retailers like Pets at Home suspend sales of rabbits around Easter to prevent impulse purchases that lead to 4 out of 5 pet rabbits being abandoned or dying from ill-health within a year, due to a lack of understanding that rabbits can be a decade-long, and quite demanding (albeit rewarding) commitment requiring daily exercise and attention, not just passive balls of fluff that can be kept in a small cage (Brooks, 2024). Social media campaigns like the ‘Don’t Buy Bunnies for Easter’ video trend or #AdoptDontShop similarly aim to discourage impulse bunny buying, or the buying of pets of any species from commercial retailers altogether.

This discussion has come a long way from rabbit toes, but I hope to have demonstrated that the impulse for animators to include toe beans on cartoon rabbits is not simply a bizarre annoyance for pedants like me. The erroneous toe bean exists as part of a much larger web of misconceptions about these creatures – and perhaps also a lack of curiosity about them, and what’s on the soles of their feet – which may in turn lead to negative consequences for real rabbits.

It is for these reasons that Watership Down – both Richard Adams’s original 1972 novel, and the 1978 animated film – stand out to this day for their careful representations of rabbit life. In both the novel and film, wild rabbits embark on a quest across the English countryside for a new home after one of their number, the clairvoyant Fiver, has a prophetic vision of their warren’s imminent destruction by human real estate developers. The rabbits’ dangerous journey is presented in detail as they encounter threats from humans, animal predators, and even other rabbits. Tom Jordan praises Adams’s novel for doing what so little other fictional rabbit stories do, which is to depict ‘credibly real rabbits living in their own environment’ (1983, 229). Adams famously used R. M. Lockley’s non-fiction book The Private Life of the Rabbit (1964) as a key source informing his novel. Rosen’s film continues in this vein in its hyperreal representation of rabbits and the careful recreation of the film’s countryside setting in Hampshire, England.

Fig. 3 - Prince with a Thousand Faces: Watership Down's Bigwig is by turns playful and mischievous (here mocking an off-screen Fiver with his unbeaned toes)…

Fig. 4 - ...and capable of inflicting serious damage (locked in a fierce brawl with villain Woundwort).

Watership Down is perhaps now best known as “the film that traumatised a generation” (Power 2018) because child viewers were not prepared for its images of graphic violence inflicted by and upon rabbits that clash against popular perceptions of the animal as cute, cuddly and above all suitable for children. But this overwhelming idea of Watership Down as a violent trauma-fest is itself a misconception (albeit an understandable one), and one that I attempt to contextualise in my edited collection Watership Down: Perspectives on and Beyond Animated Violence (2023). As my fellow authors and I aim to show in the collection, there is much more to Watership Down than just bloody bunnies. For instance, for rabbit enthusiasts like me, one of the many pleasures of watching Watership Down is in seeing how well the animators captured the diversity of rabbit behaviour and personalities: whether in the tentative hops of the anxious Fiver or timid Pipkin, Bigwig’s disgruntled kicks or bemusement when faced with Kehaar the seagull, and even the propensity for rabbits to lash out with violence, as we see in the film’s notoriously bloody finale (Figs. 3-4). Elsewhere, the idea that rabbits can be both cute and scary is treated as humorous (see Monty Python and the Holy Grail’s killer rabbit of Caerbannog [Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, 1975]) or received as too ridiculous to take seriously (as in so-bad-its-good cult film Night of the Lepus [William F. Claxton, 1972]). But in Watership Down, this multifaceted quality of rabbits is treated as natural. For many Watership Down fans it was precisely the way the film and novel presented the rabbit in ways we had never seen before that endeared us to both the Watership Down world and this fascinating creature. While the rabbits in Watership Down are still anthropomorphised – for instance, in their folkloric belief system, or subtle differences in regional accent to shape our perceptions of each character – it remains the high watermark for rabbits in animation, with not a toe bean in sight.

On the back cover of the BFI’s new Blu-ray of the film, a quote from Guillermo del Toro celebrates how that Watership Down ‘stands alone as a horizon never reached’. While I don’t wish to dispute his assertion as to the specialness of Watership Down, it would be a wonderful thing if more contemporary animated films followed in its paw prints when it comes to the care and attention it gives to rabbit representation.

**Article published: November 29, 2024**

References

Brooks, Cally, 2024. “Pets at Home stops selling rabbits and issues warning to all customers.” The Express (March 29, 2024). Available at: https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1882219/pets-at-home-stops-selling-rabbits-easter.

Davis, Susan E. and Margo Demello, 2003. Stories Rabbits Tell: A Natural and Cultural History of a Misunderstood Creature. New York: Lantern Books.

Jordan, Tom, 1983. “Breaking Away from the Warren.” In Children’s Novels and the Movies, ed. Douglas Street, 227–235. F. Ungar Publishing Company.

Lester, Catherine, ed. 2023. Watership Down: Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence. New York: Bloomsbury.

Petplan, 2018. “Most Popular Pets in the UK – Pet Statistics.” Available at: https://www.petplan.co.uk/pet-information/blog/most-popular-pets/.

PDSA, 2024. “PSDA Animal Wellbeing Paw Report 2024.” Available at https://www.pdsa.org.uk/media/14944/pdsa_paw-report-2024.pdf.

Power, Ed. 2018. “A piercing screen: How Watership Down terrified an entire generation.” The Independent, 20 October. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/watership-down-film-bright-eyes-rabbits-disease-martin-rosen-richard-adams-disney-a8590226.html [accessed 5 October 2021].

Radulovic, Petrana, 2010. “With The Wild Robot, Chris Sanders finally set computer animation free.” Polygon (August 31, 2010). Available at: https://www.polygon.com/animation-cartoons/446701/the-wild-robot-chris-sanders-interview-animation.

Wells, Paul, 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.

Biography

Catherine Lester is Associate Professor in Film and Television at the University of Birmingham. You can read and hear more of her hare-brained thoughts about Watership Down, rabbits, and scary children’s media in the open access edited collection Watership Down: Perspectives On and Beyond Animated Violence (Bloomsbury, 2023) and in an audio-commentary (with Sam Summers) on the BFI’s special edition Blu-ray of the film. She is also author of Horror Films for Children: Fear and Pleasure in American Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Youth & Horror Research Network.