Who watches the Watchmen?

Now that Watchmen is an animated film, the answer is all of us. Watchmen Chapter 1 is DC’s newest full-length animated film, kicking off a two-part adaptation of the acclaimed 1986 Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons comic book. The movie was directed by Brandon Vietti, a longtime DC animator who fans might remember for his work on Young Justice, Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Batman: Under the Red Hood. For Watchmen, Vietti had to walk a difficult line, staying faithful to the comic while making the story work in an animated format.

“There are some events that we had to reshuffle a little bit because it just works better for a movie format,” he explains. “The original Watchmen story was crafted for twelve individual issues, and the order of events was designed for very specific pacing, for a very specific page count per issue, and that doesn't necessarily translate to great film pacing.”

Vietti credits veteran screenwriter and comic book writer J. Michael Straczynski with bringing it all together.

“Straczynski obviously has a ton of experience in television and movie writing, and he took the first crack at what would be best to reorder for best pacing in the movie format,” he shares.

One of Vietti’s favorite sequences was Doctor Manhattan’s self-imposed exile to Mars. While the scene was a big challenge, he enjoyed figuring out how to bring it to screen.

“Recapping Jon’s origin story was the biggest artistic challenge and the biggest artistic push for me,” Vietti says. “I wanted to bring something different. I saw an opportunity to use the animation medium and the filmmaking medium to try to create a sense for the audience of what it is like for Doctor Manhattan to perceive multiple points in time at the same time. The gift that Watchmen gives us through Alan Moore's writing is that throughout the story, there's a lot of nonlinear storytelling going on, from the opening of the book, where we're cutting back and forth between detectives at a crime scene and then jumping back in time to the crime happening. It sort of sets up a complexity in the storytelling that is very appealing to me.”

The next step was finding the perfect cast. Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff voices Laurie Jupiter, a character she felt drawn to. Sackhoff was particularly fascinated with the relationship between Laurie and her mother, feeling that getting constantly compared to your parents is something that so many children identify with.

“Mother and daughter relationships are so complicated already,” Sackhoff elaborates. “Even with the Silk Spectre side of it completely removed, they're already complicated. I think that we're desperate for independence from the association of being our parents. She has that in spades and can't escape it and doesn't really feel comfortable in it. That is really intriguing to me, because I have a daughter. She's two and a half, and I'm constantly trying to not eff her up too much. I'm constantly trying to look at my relationship with her and figure out, is this the way?”

Arguably the most popular—or at least recognizable—character in Watchmen is the violent, unyielding Rorschach, who is voiced by an actor who knows something about relentless detectives, Bosch’s Titus Welliver. Rorschach is one of the most complex and controversial characters in Watchmen, with readers debating for years whether Rorschach is insane or if he sees things more clearly than the rest of the world, something Welliver was happy to weigh in on.

“I think he does see things clearly,” he suggests. “I think he suffers. He's endured horrible abuse and trauma, but I don't think he's insane. I know he's considered to be schizophrenic, and I'd be interested to have a conversation, you know, hand the book off to a psychoanalyst and get their take on it because he seems very clear in his direction.”

Watchmen Chapter 1, of course, isn’t the first adaptation of the graphic novel and it’s not even the first animated Watchmen project. So why the enduring appeal and the need to get these adaptations right?

“I think it taps into a lot of stuff on a social level, a political level and a historical level,” offers Welliver. “And then within that framework, there's the human condition that these characters live in.”

Vietti had similar thoughts.

“It's a timeless story,” the director states. “I think that the themes, the complexity of the characters and also just the complexity of the world that these characters live in echoes what's going on in our world and what's going on in our lives. We can always, no matter where we're at in time, come back to these characters and find ourselves. We can find these characters struggling in a very complicated world.”
 

Watchmen Chapter 1 is now available on digital. Look for it on 4K UHD and Blu-ray on August 27^th.

Joshua Lapin-Bertone writes about TV, movies and comics for DC.com, is a regular contributor to the Couch Club and writes our monthly Batman column, "Gotham Gazette." Follow him on Twitter at @TBUJosh.