Watchmen

I wasn't sure what to expect from this motion comic. I bought it with The Ultimate cut edition of the live action film. When I first began to watch it I wasn't sure it was going to be very good. The animation took a while to get used to and the use of the same male narrator for the female voices was jarring but by the end of the series I was utterly blown away.The Narrator is incredible talented at bringing the voices of our most beloved characters to life. Each voice is so unique that after a while I forgot that it was the same Narrator for all of the characters. His best voice acting was for my two favorite characters Rorschach and Dr.Manhattan. His performance as those two characters was so deeply compelling that I felt like I was watching a live action show when I watched their back story centric episodes.

Everything about this feels exactly like the graphic Novel. The animation is great and feels like a walking, Breathing comic. Most of the brilliant and poetic words from the novel is delivered Beautifully. The Motion comic is split into two episodes representing each Chapter in the plot. It runs about 5 and a half hours long.

For the longest time, "Watchmen" was considered an unfilmable property. It took years to get the script, visuals and story into a form that was manageable for a motion picture, let alone the rumored miniseries.

While I appreciate the talent that went into the "Watchmen Motion Comic", I can't help but think that the project just took a few weeks or months to put together in an effort to cash in on the Watchmen marketing blitz. Some bits of it are rather well done, most of it is just long and expositional, and a few parts, especially the female characterizations, are embarrassing to watch. The original "Watchmen" comic was none too kind to women, and this video is even less so.

Apart from the single baritone male voice that reads the entire comic aloud, the whole thing has one massive issue with pacing. When you read a comic book, you set your own pace. You can spend half an hour gazing at a single panel of ultra-violence, or you can blip through a dozen panels of navel-gazing introspection, it's your choice.

I suppose you can advance the DVD at whatever pace you'd like, but sometimes the voices and the animation just do not flow naturally, and the motion comic lingers over scenes that should be brief and skips over stuff that needs more visual attention.

After a while, I found myself becoming obsessed that the characters never (or seldom) blinked and their mouth movements would periodically and reliably go askew. Maybe you like the theatrical film, or maybe you don't. Maybe you like the motion comic, I know I don't. If you want the best Watchmen experience, bloated, misogynistic, dated, self-important, and yet compelling and even a little beautiful under all that blood and ick, just read the book.

This is a curio, simple as that. And yet it's hard to ignore the work that went into it. This is a one-of-a-kind occurrence. Normally a book is translated into an audio format, like a radio play (at best) and with a narrator or sometimes actors playing various roles (i.e. Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas the audio book has this). With Watchmen, unlike the movie by Zack Snyder, this is absolutely faithful to the source, with every panel included (the only thing it lacks, somewhat sadly, are those novel-type in-between chapters in Watchmen, such as the excerpts from Under the Hood), and with Dave Gibbons and the original colorist included.

It's a pleasure to watch the images come to life, and with a level of vibrancy that does make one see the recreation of an entire masterwork. As with the book, you can get sucked in and want to read/watch the entire thing. The only big difference, however, and the most glaring deterrent, is that when reading the Watchmen book you can fill in the gaps and the characters with your own voices and accents and things, as with any book, and pause at will. With this, it's continuous and with one voice only. This isn't to decry Tom Stechschulte too much, since he bounces between the male characters reasonably well (he even puts on a clever Nixon accent). But when it comes to the women, or with certain minorities (i.e. the pregnant Vietnamese woman), it doesn't work nearly as well. It's a matter of taste, perhaps, but they should have tried for a few more actors or voice-people to cover the book-on-video.

But if you're a big fan of the book, and you have an interest in seeing something like this that hasn't been done before, do check it out, if only for a few episodes. It's an approach that could pave the way for more... which depending on point of view is a great thing or a terrible thing. At the least it's an admirable experiment.

Like everyone else, I couldn't wait to see the "real" Watchmen movie come this March, and was pleasantly surprised when I heard of this animated series.

Let me tell you, just about everything here is perfect. It's pretty much a panel-by-panel adaptation (though even with 12 half-hour episodes I could notice a few scenes here and there were trimmed for time). However, every single page comes to life thanks to the wonderfully epic musical score and the little touches added in - such as the character's clothes flapping in the wind, their changing expressions, or the camera work that often focuses on all the interesting details we might have missed in the real novel.

But I'll reserve special praise for the narrator. Even though it's a bit jarring at first to have one guy doing ALL the voices (even women's!), you soon realize that it's basically how it would sound if you read it aloud to yourself, for example. You'll quickly notice that every character is done differently (and perfectly!) - Rorschac with his monotone, gravelly voice, God-like Doc Manhattan and even the whiny Night-Owl just sound exactly like I would expect them to.

So definitely give this a try. I would maybe even recommend this to someone who hasn't read the novel before or hates comic books in general, as on the first read-through all the other extra material (journals, articles, etc) that is included in the printed version (and left out here) would probably just fly over most people's heads anyway. And trust me, like the other poster before me said, if the opening shot and monologue don't draw you in, I don't know what will.

Bought last night and watched it all in one sitting. 10 out of 10. Can't wait to see the movie tonight at the IMAX! I bought the comic years ago and have read several times over the years. The writing rivaling many classics I have enjoyed time and again over the years. Other than Frank Millers Ronin I can not think of a another graphic novel I have so looked forward to on the big screen....The writing was something and such a level I had never seen in a comic and containing such dark view points I had never seen in such a media. I was always of the opinion that this was a graphic novel that would never see the big screen. The comic in motion literally brings to life what I have read in comic form for so long in such a new way and perspective.