The impulse to iterate on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is, maybe, a testomony to its singularity. Printed throughout 1986 and 1987, Watchmen deconstructed the traditions of cape comics, charming the minds of superhero followers and normies alike. Hollywood spent years attempting to crack an adaptation, whereas DC dreamed of increasing the story, but Watchmen at all times felt too sacred — till it wasn’t. The late 2000s gave us Zack Snyder’s Watchmen film and a prequel collection, Earlier than Watchmen, which opened the door to a correct follow-up, Doomsday Clock, a trenchant HBO sequel collection, and Tom King’s stand-alone noir, Rorschach. The solely one that didn’t look after any of it was Alan Moore.
So what’s left to say or do with Watchmen? For DC Animation, it was going again to the fundamentals. This month’s Watchmen: Chapter 1 is the first half of a two-part adaptation that recreates Moore and Gibbons’ comedian on a molecular stage. Panels come to life; dialogue is acted out by a notable voice forged. And simply as Gus Van Sant had his experimental pitch for remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho body for body, Watchmen director Brandon Vietti (Batman: Underneath the Purple Hood, Younger Justice) says there was a clear inventive mission in the reverent strategy to bringing Moore and Gibbons’ work to life once more: There are issues in animation you simply can’t do in some other medium.
“The complexity of the original book is very deep, and that’s what I love about it. That’s what everybody loves about it,” Vietti tells Polygon. “So the question was, how can we capture that world of Watchmen, that complexity of the storytelling, but also the look of the book? There was a beauty of Dave Gibbons’ artistry, both in his design and his filmmaking, if you will, the way he used the camera to set up his shots, panel by panel. [That] was something I also tried to capture with our filmmaking, so that you get that sense of realism that I think Dave brings and Alan Moore’s story creates, bring that into an animated medium, but then also find ways within the story to tell the story embracing the strengths of animation.”
For Watchmen: Chapter 1, sound is a type of strengths, particularly vocal performances that might lean additional into the drama than they may in the actuality of reside motion. Vietti assembled a forged of notable actors for the movie — together with Titus Welliver as Rorschach, Katee Sackhoff as Laurie, Troy Baker as Adrian Veidt, and Broadway vet Michael Cerveris as Physician Manhattan — all of whom got here with various levels of admiration for the textual content. Welliver tells Polygon he was a big comedian man in the Nineteen Sixties and ‘70s before having his world shook by Watchmen.
“When I got the call to do this, and was told it was [for] Rorschach, I flipped out. I mean, I completely flipped out,” he says. “But my first question to them was, ‘I’m a purist, so please inform me that you simply’re actually going to do a devoted rendering of this?’ And so they stated, ‘100%.’”
Whereas years on Bosch gave Welliver the likelihood to flex his neo-noir muscle tissue, he says that the inventive staff made a resolution early on to lower traditional detective story voice-over from the scripts — and that enjoying Rorschach in Watchmen was a welcome likelihood to throw all the approach again to the heyday of crime fiction. He admits it took a few days for him to actually nail Walter Kovacs’ masked VO, and Jackie Earle Haley’s efficiency from the Snyder movie loomed massive.
“I was not going to do a straight impression of Jackie doing the character. He did a brilliant job, and I wanted to pay respect […] but I had to kind of make it my own.” Having the ability to summon the energy of Gibbons’ unique panels, and realizing his voice could be matched with them, helped him ultimately nail the rage-filled grumble — and by day two he was totally in. “There was a lot of lifting and listening, trying to find that cadence to bring it into [classic noir sound], while also trying to stay away from it.”
Picture: DC Animation
Katee Sackoff got here at the undertaking from the full other way, first latching on to Laurie’s humanity, then following Vietti’s imaginative and prescient for what her trauma — derived from abusive relationships and the usually poisonous enterprise of caped crusading — would really feel like on display. Her one level of order: She didn’t return and browse the e-book in any respect.
“The idea of keeping something true to form […] that was Brandon’s intention. What I was asked to bring to it was my take on Laurie. What do you feel about her? What do you think she’s going through? Who is she at her core? Those were the conversations that we had. […] I wanted people to hear her pain and her vulnerability. I wanted people to identify with that and to understand what she was going through, and to have Laurie sort of pull you into the story. To me, she felt like the one that people could identify with through this.”
Whereas a lot of Watchmen: Chapter 1’s sequences are one-for-one with the comedian, Vietti notes that there have been nonetheless loads of cuts, tweaks, and reimaginings required to deliver Watchmen in beneath the run time of two animated motion pictures. Pivotal scenes from later in the e-book seem in Chapter 1 as flashbacks, whereas bits of the in-universe comedian Tales of the Black Freighter bleed into the motion via cross-cut montage and voice-over. But when it comes to a scene that might solely occur on this format, Vietti factors to Physician Manhattan’s transformation and eventual departure for Mars.
“The entire goal there was to help the audience feel what it’s like for Doctor Manhattan to feel multiple points in time simultaneously,” the director says. “And that’s something I think can best be done in filmmaking with things like transitions and tricks of cutting, editing, but then animation as well, the way we use the camera throughout that sequence, some of the effects that are applied, these are things that certainly could be done in live action with the help of CG.”
Similar to in the e-book, Jon Osterman finds himself in the incorrect place at the incorrect time at the lab and will get vaporized at the subatomic stage. As Vietti performs it in Chapter 1, the ticking of the watch Jon went to retrieve booms via the sequence, then continues its cacophony as Physician Manhattan’s thoughts wanders via reminiscence.
“You feel the tension. You’re feeling the passage of time, [which] is so important for the character of Doctor Manhattan. It was a character choice to do that kind of editing, and it was terribly important for the character of the book and for the moment and for the audience to feel that the way that Manhattan does,” Vietti says.
As a lifelong Watchmen fan, Welliver says he couldn’t be happier with the strategy. “It’s basically the panels come to life,” he says, sounding really in awe. “It’s mind-blowing to me. I hope that the fans have the same experience.”
