Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic (review)

The concept sounded potentially intriguing to me, but, well, it turns out to be quite bizarre. The original Watchmen comic -- all 12 issues -- have been just barely animated by adding a bit of motion to the existing art, overlaying some music, and having a “narrator,” Tom Stechschulte, read the text (which is also onscreen). The transfer from page to screen was overseen the original artist, Dave Gibbons, and it does indeed look very much like the graphic novel, but I don’t see any reason to watch this on a TV when it’s a much more pleasurable and rewarding experience to read it for myself. To be fair, I’m no fan of audiobooks, either, and this is probably the closest a graphic novel could come to audiobook-hood... but there’s a factor here that does not come up with purely aural audiobooks: Stechschulte provides the voices of all the characters, male and female, and while that might not be jarring when you’re only listening to a book being read to you, it’s deeply jarring to be seeing an illustration of a women and yet hearing a gruff male voice. These 12 30-minute episodes -- about five and a half hours of pseudo animation in all -- were first available on iTunes, and they’re still available at $1.99 a pop. With no extras to speak of on the disc (a preview of another cartoon is an ad, not a bonus), you might want to try out a sample episode online before you buy this DVD, to see if it’s right for you.
viewed at home on a small screen
not rated
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comments
posted by Bongwater (Thu Mar 05 09, 12:11PM)
I think it's definitely worth a rental. I do agree that the "audiobook"-iness of the whole thing drags it down a bit. With a full cast (or even just a female voice to offset), this could have been a home run for me. I loved the animation, reminiscent of the old 60's Marvel Comics style where they would just use static art and move the camera. It looked kinda weird at first, but I think some of the crafted shots were truly inspired. Rorschach's search of Blake's apartment in Ep 1 was just outstanding.