Everybody is on pins and needles worrying about if the director of 300 is going to ruin the upcoming movie version of Watchmen. Well, somebody may already have. It's not a good sign. Whatever they were thinking, they didn't think long enough. OK. Here's the deal. You take Watchmen, arguably the greatest comic ever, and you animate it in a kind of noir fashion. You distribute it in segments on iTunes and charge 2 bucks an episode.
Brilliant.
Except this. They only hired one guy to do every voice in the book. I understand the concept, and it works for audiobooks, but it crashes and burns like Slim Pickens on a nuke for an animated comic. It is the creepiest sensation, I tell ya, to hear a dude's voice while you're watching a chick's body, especially when the chick is telling that same dude why good times aren't the same any more.
It's an astonishing psychological effect to recognize this particular cognitive dissonance. For all of the audiobooks I've consumed, at least a dozen including several Harry Potters, a number of Jeeves and Woosters and most recently a John Sandford mystery having a single narrator has never been a problem. In my imagination, it works just fine, whether the character be male or female, young or old, good or bad. I've been very impressed by most of the voice talent - even the guy who did Marley and Me. But for Watchmen, it's just not working at all. And it all kind of hit at once in a particular scene where I just stopped and said whoa!
I'm still jazzed about the upcoming movie even though the fanboys are freaking about Sony's legal chicanery. I'm certain it's going to be a big hit; the buzz is unstoppable. But these guys at Warner Premier Motion Comics need to do a serious bit of thinking before they add the next ep to iTunes. For the love of rationality, hire a woman.
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