The impetus to build on the ideas of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons Guards is perhaps evidence of its singularity. Published in 1986 and 1987, Guards deconstructed the traditions of cape comics, and captivated the minds of superhero fans and normies alike. Hollywood tried for years to crack an adaptation, while DC dreamed of expanding the story, but Guards always felt too sacred — until it wasn’t. In the late 2000s, we got Zack Snyder’s Guards film and a prequel series, For Watchmenwhich opened the door for a good sequel, Doomsday Clocka sharp HBO sequel series, and Tom King’s standalone noir, RorschachThe only person who didn’t care each Alan Moore was the main character.
So what is there left to say or do with Guards? For DC Animation it was back to basics. This month Guardians: Chapter 1 is the first half of a two-part adaptation that recreates Moore and Gibbons’ comic strip on a molecular level. Panels come to life; dialogue is delivered by a remarkable voice cast. And just like Gus Van Sant, experimental pitch for remaking Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho frame by frame, Guards director Brandon Vietti (Batman: Under the Red Hood, Young Justice) says there was a clear creative mission in the reverent approach to bringing Moore and Gibbons’ work back to life: 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,” Vietti tells Polygon. “So the question was, how do we take that world of Guardsthat complexity of the storytelling, but also the look of the book? There was a beauty in Dave Gibbons’ artistry, both in his design and in his filmmaking, if you will, the way he used the camera to set up his shots, panel by panel. (That) was something that I tried to capture with our filmmaking as well, so that you get that sense of realism that I think Dave brings and Alan Moore’s story creates, brings that into an animated medium, but then also finds ways within the story to tell the story using the strengths of animation.”
For Guardians: Chapter 1Sound is one of those strengths, particularly vocal performances that could lean more into the drama than they could 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 brought varying degrees of admiration to the text. Welliver tells Polygon that he was a huge comedian in the ’60s and ’70s before his world was shocked by Guards.
“When I got the call to do this, and I was told it was (for) Rorschach, I was completely upset. I mean, I complete “I flipped out,” he says. “But my first question to them was, ‘I’m a purist, so please tell me are you really going to do a faithful representation of this?’ And they said, ‘100%.’”
While years later Bosch gave Welliver the chance to flex his neo-noir muscles, he says the creative team decided early on to eliminate classic detective story voiceovers from the scripts — and that playing Rorschach in Guards was a welcome chance to go all the way back to the glory days of crime fiction. He admits it took him a few days to really get the hang of Walter Kovacs’ masked VO, and Jackie Earle Haley’s performance from the Snyder film was big.
“I didn’t want to directly imitate Jackie as a character. He did a fantastic job and I wanted to give him respect (…), but I had to make it my own.” By being able to summon the power of Gibbons’ original panels and knowing his voice would match that, he was eventually able to control the angry muttering — and by day two, he was fully into it. “There was a lot of lifting and listening, trying to find that cadence to bring it into[a classic noir sound]while also trying to stay away from it.”
Katee Sackoff approached the project from a completely opposite direction, first clinging to Laurie’s humanity, then following Vietti’s vision of how her trauma — stemming from abusive relationships and the generally toxic business of caped crusading — would play out on screen. Her one point of order: She didn’t go back and read the book at all.
“The idea of keeping something true to form (…) that was Brandon’s intention. What I was asked to bring was my take on Laurie. What do you think of her? What do you think she’s going through? Who is she at her core? Those were the conversations that we had. (…) I wanted people to hear her pain and vulnerability. I wanted people to relate to that and understand what she was going through, and for Laurie to kind of take you into the story. To me, she felt like the one that people could relate to through this.”
While many of Guardians: Chapter 1‘s sequences are one-to-one with the comic, Vietti notes that there were still many cuts, adjustments and reinterpretations needed to Guards in less than the running time of two animated films. Key scenes from later in the book appear in Chapter 1 as flashbacks, while pieces of the comic remain in the universe Tales of the Black Freighter bleed into the action through cross-cut editing and voice-over. But when it comes to a scene that could only happen in this format, Vietti points to Doctor Manhattan’s transformation and eventual departure for Mars.
“The whole goal was to make the audience feel what it’s like for Doctor Manhattan to feel multiple moments in time at once,” the director says. “And that’s something I think is best done in filmmaking with things like transitions and tricks of cutting, editing, but also animation, the way we use the camera in that sequence, some of the effects that are done, these are things that can definitely be done in live action using CG.”
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 puts it in Chapter 1the ticking of the watch Jon was about to pick up throughout the scene, and then the cacophony of sounds continues as Doctor Manhattan’s mind wanders through memories.
“You feel the tension. You feel the passage of time, (which) is so important to the character of Doctor Manhattan. It was a character choice to do that kind of adaptation, and it was terribly important to the character of the book and to the moment and to the audience to feel that the way Manhattan does,” Vietti says.
As a lifelong Guards fan, Welliver says he couldn’t be happier with the approach. “It’s basically the panels coming to life,” he says, sounding genuinely awestruck. “It’s overwhelming for me. I hope the fans have the same experience.”