The impulse to repeat Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Guardian is perhaps a testament to its uniqueness. Published between 1986 and 1987, Guardian deconstructed the traditions of cape comics and captured the minds of superhero fans and regular people alike. Hollywood spent years trying to create an adaptation while DC dreamed of expanding the story, but Guardian always felt too sacred – until it wasn’t anymore. The late 2000s brought us Zack Snyder’s Guardian Film and a prequel series, Before Watchmenwhich opened the door for a proper sequel, Doomsday Clocka sharp-witted HBO sequel series, and Tom King’s standalone noir film, Rorschach. The only person who didn’t care any of them was Alan Moore.
So what remains to be said or done with Guardian? DC Animation went back to basics. This month Guardians: 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 delivered by a remarkable voice cast. And just as Gus Van Sant made his experimental pitch for the remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho Frame by frame, Guardian Director Brandon Vietti (Batman: Under the Red Hood, Young Justice) says that behind the respectful approach to bringing Moore and Gibbons’ works back to life was a clear creative mission: “There are things in animation that you 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 everyone loves about it,” says Vietti. “So the question was, how can we capture that world? Guardianthat complexity of storytelling, but also the look of the book? Dave Gibbons’ artistry was beautiful, both in his design and in his cinematography, if you will, in the way he used the camera to build up his shots frame by frame. (That) was something I tried to capture with our cinematography as well, so that you get that sense of realism that I think Dave brings and that Alan Moore’s story creates, and bring that into an animated medium, but then also find ways to tell the story within the story, using the strengths of animation.”
Image: DC Animation
For Guardians: Chapter 1the sound is one of those strengths, particularly the vocal performances, which were able to focus more on the drama than would be the case 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 veteran Michael Cerveris as Doctor Manhattan — all of whom came with varying degrees of admiration for the text. Welliver says he was a great comedian in the 1960s and ’70s before his world was rocked by Guardian.
“When I got the call to do this and was told it was (for) Rorschach, I freaked out. I mean, I complete “I freaked out,” he says. “But my first question to them was, ‘I’m a purist, so please tell me, are you really going to reproduce this faithfully?’ And they said, ‘100%.'”
While years later Bosch Welliver the chance to flex his neo-noir muscles, he says that the creative team made the decision early on to eliminate classic detective stories from the script – and that the role of Rorschach in Guardian was a welcome opportunity to throw himself back into the heyday of crime fiction. He admits it took him a few days to really nail Walter Kovac’s masked voice-over, and Jackie Earle Haley’s performance from the Snyder film was a big hit.
“I didn’t want to directly imitate Jackie in the role. He did a great job and I wanted to pay tribute to him (…), but I had to make it my own in some way.” Conjuring the power of Gibbons’ original panels and knowing his voice would fit them ultimately helped him nail the angry growl – and by the second day he was all in. “It took a lot of work and listening to find the right cadence to get it into (the classic noir sound) while trying to get away from it.”
Image: DC Animation
Katee Sackoff approached the project from a completely opposite direction, first clinging to Laurie’s humanity and then following Vietti’s vision of how her trauma — resulting from abusive relationships and the generally toxic business of the caped crusader — would feel on screen. Her only point of order: She hasn’t re-read the book at all.
“The idea of keeping something true to form (…) was Brandon’s intention. I was asked to bring my interpretation of Laurie. How do you feel about her? What do you think she is going through? Who is she at heart? Those were the conversations we had. (…) I wanted people to hear her pain and her vulnerability. I wanted people to identify with it and understand what she was going through and for Laurie to somehow draw you into the story. For me, she was the one that people could identify with in that situation.”
While many Guardians: Chapter 1Although the sequences correspond one-to-one with the comic, Vietti notes that there were still many cuts, optimizations and reinterpretations to Guardian in less than the running time of two cartoons. Important scenes from the later part of the book appear in Chapter 1 as flashbacks, while parts of the comic in the universe Stories from the black freighter through cross-cut montage and voice-over. But when it comes to a scene that can only take place in this format, Vietti points to the transformation of Doctor Manhattan and his eventual departure for Mars.
“The whole goal was to give the audience a sense of what it’s like for Doctor Manhattan to experience multiple points in time at once,” says the director. “And that’s something that I think is best achieved in filmmaking with things like transitions and editing tricks, but also with animation. The way we use the camera in this sequence, some of the effects used, these are things that could certainly be done in live action with the help of computer graphics.”
Just like in the book, Jon Osterman finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time in the lab and is vaporized at the subatomic level. As Vietti put it in Chapter 1the ticking of the clock that Jon went to get booms through the sequence and then continues its cacophony as Dr. Manhattan’s mind wanders through the memories.
“You feel the tension. You feel the passage of time, (which) is so important to the character of Dr. Manhattan. It was a choice of the character to do this kind of editing, and it was tremendously important to the character of the book and to the moment and for the audience to feel that the way Manhattan does,” says Vietti.
As a lifelong Guardian Welliver, a fan, says he couldn’t be happier with the approach. “The panels are basically coming to life,” he says, sounding genuinely impressed. “For me, it’s mind-blowing. I hope fans have the same experience.”
