Tales of the Black Freighter

Anybody who's familiar with the Watchmen graphic novel will recognize the significance of the Tales of the Black Freighter. This was originally the comic-within-the-comic, having nothing much to do with the events of Watchmen, but offering a stark thematic parallel.

This animated feature translates that segment of the comic to accompany the Watchmen film (and if you watch the film's Ultimate Cut, this cartoon will be spliced into the main feature). On its own, the cartoon is short, bleak, and pretty gnarly. It runs pretty fast and it tells a heck of a story.

Following the Watchmen comic closely, this feature tells a very dark and violent story full of hideously ironic twists. The story is simple, but highly effective. It offers the bare minimum characterizations, but it digs deeply into the main character's psyche and madness to dig up strong themes of humanity's savagery; themes that are effectively echoed in the Watchmen film.

This feature uses pretty decent animation quality: movements are a little stiff and cheap, but it looks sharp, clean, and well-rendered. Voice-acting is not bad, and the writing is good. Designs for the characters and settings are good, and some scenes show good imagination. Music is alright.

Recommended for anybody interested in the Watchmen film.

4/5 (Entertainment: Good | Story: Good | Film: Good)

I regard this more as something stand alone than something that accompanies The Watchmen. It is the perfect example of an animated short. The entire plot is chilling from start to end especially with Butlers sterling performance as the Sea Captain. The animation i was quite surprised how much i actually liked it as i did not expect a great deal of detail- but it looks extremely effective. I can only hope in the directors cut of Watchmen that it makes an appearance between the film as it did in the graphic novel. Though it is unfair to constantly relate this back to the film as it is its own work and has its own merits.

For me it is exactly what i wanted it to be, a haunting exploration of the inner mind.

It was a while after I watched Watchmen that I got around to getting this companion film – essentially put together from the reading of the comic of the same name within the comic of Watchmen. Not being a massive defender of the comic, I am not petty about it nor do I wish to debate for hours about how the film works without it, how the changes in the film affect this film, how you must be an idiot if you think this, or how you must be an idiot if you don't think that – and so on. No, instead I came to the short film knowing its parallels with the main story/film and yet also keen to see how it works as a film full stop.

The answer is that it works very well because it produces a really gaudy depiction of the story with a much clearer link to the mental journey of Ozymandias and/or Rorschach – again I cannot be bothered to debate it on the message boards, for my money it works for both. The film is really well animated but not to the point that it is stylised to the point where it doesn't feel real. Instead, the gore and horror is made to feel very real and very horrible – not "owh gross" horrible in the way teen slasher films are, but it is really quite tangible how awful events are from start to finish. The story is quite simple but, because the horror is so well captured, it doesn't really matter if you watch this with Watchmen in mind or not – although of course it is meant for you to do so as well. The delivery is generally strong as well thanks mainly to the impressive delivery from Butler as the captain in narration. His haunted and nuanced voice is a great fit with the graphics – in particular the captain showing on his face what we are hearing.

It is ironic because, while I thought that the full film of Watchmen struggled because of how it stuck to the events in the book to the detriment of the heart of the book, the Black Freighter appears to have captured both. I'll let others argue it out but for me it was best to strip this out of the film and, while it works well in the comic spread out over the telling of the main story, it works equally as well here as a companion short film.

Tales of the Black Freighter is set within The Watchmen universe but there are no superheroes to be found here.

With Gerard Butler as the voice talent we see a tale of a mariner who is the sole survivor of an attack on his ship by pirates and his efforts at survival and getting home to his family.

Standing at little over 20 minutes this little short actually manages to tell a story competently, but make no mistake it isn't a very nice one.

Grim, dark and harrowing this is a tale of desperation and a tale of madness and there was never going to be a happy ending here.

Depressing and hard hitting this is a watchable little piece but one that will stay with you afterwards and for all the wrong reasons.

Watch at your peril.

The Good:

Well animated

Very well written

The Bad:

Not the easiest viewing

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

This was an extra on the Watchmen (2009) dvd, I think it's better than the actual film

The Tales of the Black Freighter series in the book of Watchmen was linked to the actual plot of Watchmen with merely one line (I won't mention by whom, but it's by one of the main characters, towards the end) that ties into what and why the story is in the book thematically. But on its own the story and art in Tales of the Black Freighter is done in the source like a real old-style pulpy comic with the underlying lines going across the panels, touched up with some really gruesome images and a moral that is about next to none - the guy is sent to damnation. As a short animated film Zack Snyder and his team decided to up the ante on the style, to make it a 2-dimensional stand-alone effort with the translation almost identical to that of the source (save, perhaps, for Snyder's penchant for ridiculous amounts of bloodshed, which are more appropriate here than in the actual Watchmen film).

The animation here is gorgeous, doomed, and totally haunted. It might be considered a horror movie in some moments - the main character is on a beach and ties a bunch of his fallen dead shipmates onto a raft with body parts falling off and gas rising out from the intestines - but it's also about insanity and an unamicable downward spiral. Even having read the book and knowing it was a sad and disgustingly surreal piece of work I was not prepared for how the animation kicked my ass, so to speak. It's a startling expression of a descent into hell, a poetic fever dream done with some striking flashes of color, character, violence, and the whole disjointed but logical mood of the sea itself; when the seagulls and sharks come around it brings some of the most memorably savage bits in recent memory anywhere. Only once or twice did the action feel a little stilted, as animation can sometimes be, but it overall was a kind of minor triumph (Gerard Butler, I should add, also did very well as the voice of the pirate).