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20. No Surrender (1985)
The mighty Alan Bleasdale wrote this razor-sharp farce set on New Year’s Eve in Liverpool, where rival Catholic and Protestant militants have accidentally booked the same venue. One of the acts going horribly wrong is Elvis Costello as a stage musician who says: “I’m a bit worried about me rabbit.” With reason, as it turns out.
19. Fatal Attraction (1987)
A cheating husband (Michael Douglas) finds there are strings attached to extramarital rumpy-pumpy when his spurned lover (Glenn Close) leaves his daughter’s pet rabbit simmering on the stove. The term bunny boiler was promptly added to the dictionary.
In 1705, Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) would rather play with her 17 rabbits than make political decisions in Yorgos Lanthimos’s historical comedy-drama. It’s when we learn these are surrogates for her dead children that we start thinking of her as not just tyrannical, but tragic.
17. Night of the Lepus (1972)
“Attention! There is a herd of killer rabbits headed this way!” Beware of bunnies, especially when their chops are smeared with ketchup and they’re lolloping in slo-mo against miniature sets. Leading actor Janet Leigh later reflected: “How can you make a bunny rabbit menacing?” Quite easily, as it happens; read on for some choice examples.
16. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)
Bill and Ted are murdered by their evil robot doubles and consigned to hell, where they are tormented by their worst fears. In order of scariness, these are: an army colonel, a pucker-lipped granny – and a chubby-cheeked giant Easter bunny with an overbite.
Caged rabbits provide a backdrop to the opening credits of Jordan Peele’s home invasion psychothriller, featuring an astonishing double performance by Lupita Nyong’o that ought to have been Oscar nominated. But it’s raw rabbit meat on the menu for half the characters in the film, whether they like it or not.
If you’re quick on the freeze-frame, you can nab a rabbit stew recipe early on in Roman Polanski’s thriller. But the sister who was planning to cook it departs on holiday, leaving Carol (Catherine Deneuve) alone in their Kensington flat. The skinned rabbit carcass is left to rot, a festering symbol of her deteriorating mental state.
13. Harvey (1950)
The bunny is omnipresent in this amiable comedy, but we only ever see him in a painting. James Stewart dials the folksiness up to 11 as Elwood P Dowd, a small-town lush whose constant companion is a martini-drinking, invisible 6ft-tall rabbit pooka. His big sister tries to get Elwood committed for disrupting her society gatherings, but good-natured whimsy wins out.
Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a troubled teen visited by visions of Frank, a sinister figure in a metal-faced bunny suit, who announces that the world will end in 28 days. And so it does, though the twisty narrative ensures it’s not necessarily in the way we expect. Richard Kelly’s writing-directing debut is suffused with a uniquely ominous vibe and sets an evil rabbit benchmark.
Judy Hopps, a rookie bunny cop, teams up with Nick Wilde, a cynical fox, to solve a missing predators case. As Easter bunny family fodder, Disney’s animated fable with a clever plot and underlying plea for social tolerance is infinitely preferable to, say, Hop (2011), featuring the voice of Russell Brand, or Peter Rabbit (2018), featuring the voice of James Corden.
10. Bambi (1942)
Thumper, a loquacious bunny with the most annoying adolescent leg twitch in film history, befriends the eponymous fawn with an absentee father. Hijinks ensue. Also, Bambi’s mum gets shot dead. Curiously, this Disney classic is the only film on the list in which the rabbit does what rabbits are traditionally famed for (albeit not on screen), resulting in multiple baby bunnies.
9. Celia (1989)
Eight-year-old Celia’s beloved pet Murgatroyd is confiscated during Australia’s great rabbit cull of 1957 in Ann Turner’s terrific writing-directing debut. A fraught situation is further complicated by rampant commie-bashing, an abusive uncle and Celia’s inability to distinguish real life from her nightmares about Hobyahs, evil goblins from a children’s story. What could possibly go wrong?
8. Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003)
Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck team up with Brendan Fraser to foil the Acme Corporation’s dastardly schemes. Originally conceived as a sequel to Space Jam, this was reworked by Joe Dante into a gallimaufry of meta-references and cameos from celebrities both real and cartoon. It takes for ever to get into gear, but there is a sublime sequence in which Elmer Fudd chases Bugs and Daffy through the Louvre.
7. Inland Empire (2006)
Embedded in David Lynch’s nightmarish semi-experimental drama about a Hollywood actor (Laura Dern) who loses the plot, are fragments of what appears to be a TV sitcom about three rabbit-headed characters whose baffling non sequiturs are sporadically greeted by canned laughter. In fact, these are excerpts from Lynch’s eight-part web series Rabbits, which is even more nightmarish than Inland Empire.
“That rabbit’s got a vicious streak a mile wide!” One of the many highlights of Python’s Arthurian epic is the beast of Caerbannog, a harmless-looking bunny that rips out the throats of three knights before being eliminated by the holy hand grenade of Antioch. Let us also pay our respects to the attempt to breach French defences with a Trojan rabbit.
French animator Sylvain Chomet brings to life an unmade screenplay by comedy genius Jacques Tati. A lanky, washed-up stage magician, modelled on Tati himself, ends up lodging with a disgruntled rabbit and orphaned waif in an impeccably drawn Edinburgh, circa 1959. It’s exquisitely poignant, dialogue-free and recommended to anyone in the mood for end-of-an-era melancholy.
4. Alice (1988)
Forget Donnie Darko’s Frank – the creepiest rabbit on this list is the stuffed one that comes to life and leads Lewis Carroll’s heroine on a freaky trip through Czech animator Jan Švankmajer’s first full-length feature, in which a live-action child is surrounded by stop-motion creatures. The rabbit later threatens to decapitate Alice with a pair of scissors, par for the course in a Švankmajer film.
As the village prepares for its annual giant vegetable contest, our inventor and his dog have devised a humane way of catching rabbits. But one of Wallace’s inventions goes horribly wrong, turning him into a giant were-rabbit. As usual, Gromit has to save the day in classic Aardman stop-motion fashion: puns, sight gags, wittily choreographed action and cheese galore.
A bunch of runaway bunnies face predators, traps and vicious rivals on an epic trek through rural England in search of a new safe haven in Martin Rosen’s animated adaptation of Richard Adams’s bestselling novel. It’s action-packed, but the unsentimental view of nature as red in tooth and claw is unstinting – if you can watch this without being traumatised, I salute you.
The title character in Robert Zemeckis’s blend of live-action and animation incorporates characteristics of many of Tex Avery’s cartoon critters, including Br’er Rabbit’s feet, Bugs Bunny’s ears and Daffy Duck’s speech impediment. Charles Fleischer provides Roger’s voice in a surprisingly dark 1940s film noir plot disguised as a family blockbuster, with Bob Hoskins on exemplary form as the gumshoe on the case.
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