Putting off plans to continue watching
one animated comic in order to watch another here, but for a good reason: with the
live action Watchmen movie out next Friday, I thought it was time to reacquaint myself with
the graphic novel... though in a somewhat different medium. And with the final chapter of
this adaptation released just last week (in the US, where I have my fully-paid-up-and-legal-thank-you-very-much subscription from; in the UK soon, one would hope), it seemed a reasonable time to be getting on with it. So, chapters one to three today, and hopefully the rest before The Big Day...
It's actually a rather good adaptation, in my opinion; the best analogy is probably that it's an audiobook for graphic novels, although it goes beyond that. The animation (all based off the original art) is surprisingly animated, almost enough that you could genuinely get away with labelling it "The Animated Series", and it has sound effects and a full, original music score to back this up.
The main thing that lets it down is having one voice artist do
every character -- his women aren't especially feminine and are all bit indistinguishable, and while he has a good array of male voices there are times when the on screen speech bubbles are required to be certain who's speaking. But still: throw in just one female voice artist and an additional bloke, animate the mouths and remove the speech bubbles, and I swear this
would pass as simply
Watchmen: The Animated Series, not the rather more clunky (and plain odd)
Motion Comics.
For those who are interested, the
Watchmen Motion Comics are currently available on
iTunes (£20.99 for the series, £1.89 per episode (there're 12)), and are released on
R1 DVD and US Blu-ray on 3rd March and
R2 DVD (no Blu-ray planned) as an online exclusive on 9th March. At just £8 from the major retailers, the DVD is considerably cheaper than iTunes.
