After the last bit of role-playing material in 1990, DC went nearly two decades without producing any major adaptations of Watchmen. But not for lack of trying. Work on a film began even before the comic was finished. (It continues to astound me how so many people instantly knew this was going to be an all-time classic!) Alan Moore was initially supportive of a cinematic adaptation, but quickly soured on the project when the initial script butchered the ending with convoluted time-travel nonsense.
Moore wasn't the only one, who had doubts, and Watchmen spent the next 15 years in development hell, being passed around from studio to studio, and director to director. It earned the reputation of being "unfilmable" — a reputation encouraged by Moore himself. But DC never gave up, and in 2006, for whatever strange reason, things fell into place. Zack Snyder was chosen as the director and given a budget of $100 million (which later swelled to $150 million). This led to a flurry of Watchmen content. The comics were remastered, recolored and recollected; Dave Gibbons and John Higgins worked with Snyder on the film; Gibbons wrote a book about the making of the graphic novel; video game tie-ins and soundtracks were commissioned, the whole nine yards. Including this motion comic.
The digitization of comic books led to a lot of experimenting from Marvel and DC — and not all of it was good. Motion comics sought to find the middle ground between animation and traditional, static images. Something less expensive than an out-right cartoon, but more immersive than a typical reading experience. The end result was little more than an old-fashioned radio drama accompanied with puppets cut out from the comics, bouncing around on the screen. Ultimately, the motion comic experiment proved to be just a brief fad that died out in 2010.
However, the motion comic does allow for the most faithful, most literal adaptation possible — if that's your goal. Going panel by panel, word by word seems like the best way to preserve the original creators' intentions. Of course, Moore refused to be involved in anything regarding Watchmen at this point, even insisting that his share of the royalties go to Gibbons. I don't know if Gibbons was involved in this motion comic at all, but it appears he may have at least given it his blessing as he worked so closely with the filmmakers and promotion team.
Director John Strider Hughes made one 30-minute episode for each issue of Watchmen. The first was released on July 17, 2008, but the second didn't come out until October 6. I wonder if DC initially made just one episode to gauge the audience's reaction. And apparently it was good enough to greenlight the rest of the episodes, which were released every two weeks like clockwork, with the final episode coming out on February 23, 2009, just in time for the movie's debut in London. I don't know what the budget or timeframe for this project was, but it feels cheap and rushed.
The motion comic is technically an abridged production, but as far as I can tell, that's only because it omits all the supplemental material. Every panel from the main story seems to be included, presented with very limited animation, camera zooms and pans, sound effects and a light soundtrack by Lennie Moore. But the most bizarre choice was to have a single narrator, Tom Stechschulte, who provided the voice for each character in the story. He handled the male voices just fine, but was woefully out of his depth with the female voices. Distractingly so.
The second most bizarre choice this production made was the inclusion of the speech bubbles. They showed up just like they do in the comic, sometimes dramatically moving on their own to provide emphasis, other times awkwardly sliding along with a character who was "walking" out of the frame. This created a rather pointless distraction, seeing as how Stechschulte was already reading every single word for us. These two bizarre choices made this motion comic unbearable for many audiences, myself included. I know there are quite a few fans of this out there, but I simply cannot get over Stechschulte's grating falsetto, the unnecessary speech bubbles and — most importantly — the sheer pointlessness of the entire exercise.
What's the point in adapting a story if you're not going to change a single thing about it? With this motion comic, I'm basically just paying someone else to read it to me. The animation is so crude and static, I have to use my imagination to visualize in my mind's eye how a fully animated story would look. And I can already do that just by reading the comic. Same for the sound effects and voices. But the benefit of the voices in my head is that they're more authentic than a voice actor who cannot convincingly mimic a woman's voice. So ultimately, while this may technically be the most accurate adaptation of Watchmen you'll find, I can't recommend that anyone subject themselves to the five hours of viewing it. It truly is unwatchable.
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