I have to admit, I was in my 20s before I read Watchmen for the first time. I know that, especially now, it is considered THE comic book story masterpiece and one of the greatest novels ever written. But I was once young and foolish enough to think that heroes were supposed to be heroic. Now, because heroes have to carry their demons as close as the symbols on their tights, Watchmen's dark, conflicted psychosis seems to be the norm rather than the exception.

Perhaps these days, Watchmen seems less edgy, even pedestrian compared to books like The Authority, Preacher or The Boys. But if you read it in a historical context alongside Crisis on Infinite Earths and Marvel's X-Men or Secret Wars, you can see why Watchmen is the pioneer to whom all modern 'mature' comics owe their existence.

Why someone felt it necessary to take this story, carve up the images into nifty flash animation, float the camera around Gibbon's singular backgrounds and dance the characters like paper dolls across the screen - I don't know. To me, it seems like the ultimate crutch for those too lazy to read the graphic novel. While it is beautifully rendered and would be perfect to attract new readers with a well-executed scene, rendering all 12 books into 12 episodes in roughly 5 hours is overwhelming.

I get the feeling I'm watching Zack Snyder's animated storyboards. And that's not entertaining because I know they're not. If they were, it would at least possess the academic value of seeing Snyder's thought process of how to bridge the media between book and film. This is simply one interpretation of the story, and not a very lucid one.

First of all, the pacing is plodding, with the animation of the images taking priority over the flow of the story. We have to get every ounce of kinetic motion out of a frame before moving on and it is distracting. In some places the animation looks like clunky stick figures while others show loving detail, seamlessly melting the original sequential panels into impressive animation. The problem is that the inconsistency between these styles makes the final product look incomplete and choppy, like I’m seeing the dailies from an animated feature. Using Gibbons’ original work as the template for the motion also forces the animators to project the smallest images into foreground, where the loving character details are reduced to thick outlines and blobs where facial details should be.  

Second, Tom Stechschulte does a wonderful job in narration, but with all the effort put into rendering multiple elements in every sequence, I expected a full cast of voices. I'm used to one voice in my books on tape, but this is a different animal. The conversation between mother and daughter Silk Specters was very distracting. Laurie, in particular, is a character who is often grating and whiny to read and so the interpretation of her voice (which sounds like a man mocking the nag of an ex-wife) does little to make the character likeable.

Finally, the choice to include every line from the book shows that a lot of what we read cannot be spoken by characters without sounding forced. In the first episode, for example, the detectives investigating the murder of Edward Blake, the Comedian, give us a lot of back story in a way that two people would never talk. I forgive this in the comic, but it just doesn't work for this medium.

I guess this is just as well, since a fully animated Watchmen feature film would be too much competition for the film, which brings me back to my original question: Why? Just because it CAN be done doesn't mean it should and Watchmen the Motion Comic just is not impressive enough to convince me why it should exist at all.