The animated Watchmen replicates the comics to a T

The impulse to iterate on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is, perhaps, a testament to its singularity. Published across 1986 and 1987, Watchmen deconstructed the traditions of cape comics, captivating the minds of superhero fans and normies alike. Hollywood spent years trying to crack an adaptation, while DC dreamed of expanding the story, but Watchmen always felt too sacred — until it wasn’t. The late 2000s gave us Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie and a prequel series, Before Watchmen, which opened the door to a proper follow-up, Doomsday Clock, a trenchant HBO sequel series, and Tom King’s stand-alone noir, Rorschach. The only person who didn’t care for any of it was Alan Moore.

So what’s left to say or do with Watchmen? For DC Animation, it was going back to the basics. This month’s Watchmen: Chapter 1 is the first half of a two-part adaptation that recreates Moore and Gibbons’ comic on a molecular level. Panels come to life; dialogue is acted out by a notable voice cast. And just as Gus Van Sant had his experimental pitch for remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho frame for frame, Watchmen director Brandon Vietti (Batman: Under the Red Hood, Young Justice) says there was a clear creative mission in the reverent approach to bringing Moore and Gibbons’ work to life again: There are things in animation you just can’t do in any 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 one of those strengths, specifically vocal performances that could lean further into the drama than they might in the reality of live action. Vietti assembled a cast of notable actors for the film — including Titus Welliver as Rorschach, Katee Sackhoff as Laurie, Troy Baker as Adrian Veidt, and Broadway vet Michael Cerveris as Doctor Manhattan — all of whom came with varying degrees of admiration for the text. Welliver tells Polygon he was a huge comic guy in the 1960s 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 tell me that you’re really going to do a faithful rendering of this?’ And they said, ‘100%.’”

While years on Bosch gave Welliver the chance to flex his neo-noir muscles, he says that the creative team made a decision early on to cut classic detective story voice-over from the scripts — and that playing Rorschach in Watchmen was a welcome chance to throw all the way back to the heyday of crime fiction. He admits it took a few days for him to really nail Walter Kovacs’ masked VO, and Jackie Earle Haley’s performance from the Snyder film loomed large.

“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.” Being able to summon the power of Gibbons’ original panels, and knowing his voice would be matched with them, helped him eventually nail the rage-filled grumble — and by day two he was fully 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.”

Katee Sackoff came at the project from the complete opposite direction, first latching on to Laurie’s humanity, then following Vietti’s vision for what her trauma — derived from abusive relationships and the generally toxic business of caped crusading — would feel like on screen. Her one point of order: She didn’t go back and read the book at all.

“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.”

While many of Watchmen: Chapter 1’s sequences are one-for-one with the comic, Vietti notes that there were still plenty of cuts, tweaks, and reimaginings required to bring Watchmen in under the run time of two animated movies. Pivotal scenes from later in the book appear in Chapter 1 as flashbacks, while bits of the in-universe comic Tales of the Black Freighter bleed into the action through cross-cut montage and voice-over. But when it comes to a scene that could only happen in this format, Vietti points to Doctor 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.”

Just like in the book, Jon Osterman finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time at the lab and gets vaporized at the subatomic level. As Vietti plays it in Chapter 1, the ticking of the watch Jon went to retrieve booms through the sequence, then continues its cacophony as Doctor Manhattan’s mind wanders through memory.

“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 could not be happier with the approach. “It’s basically the panels come to life,” he says, sounding truly in awe. “It’s mind-blowing to me. I hope that the fans have the same experience.”

Watchmen: Chapter 1 is out now on digital platforms, and on 4K Blu-ray on Aug. 27. Watchmen: Chapter 2 is set to debut later in 2024.