Although we’re still just a little more than a year away from the March 2009 re lase of director Zack Snyder’s adaptation of the graphic novel classic Watchmen, it is evidently not too early to talk about the film’s inevitable DVD release.
Empire has confirmed that Snyder will be including an animated short film adapting the “Tales Of The Black Freighter” comic that appears in Watchmen on its eventual DVD release, with Snyder’s 300 star Gerard Butler supplying the voice of the main character, a sailor racing home to stop the undead crew of a haunted boat from killing his loved ones.
I’m going to do the voice of the captain. They’re going to do it in the style of a Japanese anime and I’m totally stoked. I actually read the script before reading the comic book and I thought it was awesome. Then I read the comic book and it’s great. The little bits that have been added define it so much more. It’s very dark and there’s just something so descriptive and scary. It’s this descent into madness but explained in such a sane way that you totally feel it yourself. By the end, my heart was pumping!
“Tales of the Black Freighter” has proven to be one of the harder aspects of the Watchmen novel to bring to the silver screen. A comic about pirate adventures, the excerpts seen in Watchmen provide a counterpoint to one character’s particular story arc. In the two decades that Watchmen has been in development, every director has found working the material into the framework of a film to be problematic. It looks like Snyder has found a way to placate fans who may have felt cheated if the comic didn’t appear in the film.
