In between them and safety are rivers and train tracks, the “elil” (the “enemies,” foxes, owls and such) and the mindless, deadly “hrududil” (machines) of humans. But the ultimate enemy proves to be another rabbit, General Woundwort (Ben Kingsley, leaning into the big-bad role), who has turned his colony, Efrafa, into a militaristic kind of Bunny Sparta in the name of safety.

This “Watership,” a coproduction of BBC One and Netflix written by Tom Bidwell and directed by Noam Murro (“300: Rise of an Empire”), sticks fairly close to the novel. (Kehaar, the Eastern European-accented sea gull, is now Scottish for some reason, courtesy of Peter Capaldi’s voicing, but I may be the only crank bothered by this.)

But it soft-pedals some gory details. The recounting of the destruction of the warren — hauntingly rendered in the 1978 movie — is rushed through; when the group’s burly enforcer, Bigwig (John Boyega), deals a death blow to a crow, the scene cuts to a flash of lightning.

It is, nonetheless, not a carefree kids’ story at heart (though kids can definitely watch, as long as they know what to expect). The strength of Adams’s novel was how deeply it committed to imagining a whole culture for rabbitdom. What kind of society would evolve from creatures who lived their entire lives as prey?

Adams conceived an animistic religion, ruled by the sun (Lord Frith), with rabbits championed by El-ahrairah (“The prince with a thousand enemies”), a sort of trickster-figure combo of Anansi the spider and Bugs Bunny. (The series lays out their creation myth in a prologue whose silhouette art is its one creative stroke of animation.) Adams imagined rabbits not as people but as a people, whose identity is founded in pride over their history of persecution and survival.

I’d hoped the series would use its longer format to do more of this world-building. Instead, it mainly stretches out the fight and escape sequences, making it less a bittersweet story of survival and freedom and more like a summer family action-pic. (It also builds up some of the female characters, like the Efrafan rebel Hyzenthlay, voiced by Anne-Marie Duff; the novel, focused on the male rabbits’ quest for mates, is rather a rabbit sausage-fest.)