It seems that 45 years after the fact, people are being taken by surprise at how painful a gut punch the Watership Down movie (1978) can be:

https://www.fatherly.com/entertainm.....ids-and-family

I can't blame them. Whatever you were expecting when you started watching, this movie goes beyond it, and then some. I wrote my own brief review of the Blu-ray (Criterion Collection) release some years ago:

Martin Rosen's Pastoral Symphony

WATERSHIP DOWN is a simple adventure story about a group of rabbits seeking a new place to call home -- simple, that is, until you see that it's part political allegory and part POW escape thriller, woven together with a trickster creation myth and the kind of death-haunted theology one could imagine in the lives of a prey species at the mercy of a world of predators.

Is this a kids' movie? Sure, for thoughtful, older kids who won't be freaked out by seeing some of life's harsher realities on the screen.

[Director] Martin Rosen's second and last animated feature, The Plague Dogs (a 1984 film also based on a Richard Adams novel), took those "harsher realities" to their limits in a story of two escaped laboratory animals on the run, to the extent where I haven't watched it again in decades ; I'm not sure I want to subject myself to that imagery again. (One could call it Harlan Ellison syndrome.)

Watership Down argues, in the starkest possible terms, that life for the least privileged among us is bleak but not hopeless; I'd say that's more than most movies or shows can, or would even try to, give us.