My grade two teacher was a sadist. Why else would you make a
classroom full of seven-year-olds cry by showing them a bunny cartoon?
Watership Down, of course, is no ordinary bunny cartoon; based on the
award-winning 1972 fantasy book about several societies of anthropomorphized
rabbits coming into conflict, it’s violent, bloody and has many little bunny rabbits being harmed and killed. When the only cartoons you’ve known
previously are of the sunny, happy Saturday morning variety, the brutality of
Watership Down is an innocence-destroying horror-show (I'm not the only one to suffer from this film either).
Later, I discovered horror comic books, namely the stuff
from EC Comics and its
imitators. Gruesome imagery, sanity-sapped protagonists and plots twisted with
ironic punishment are the hallmarks of these types of tales. In Alan Moore’s Watchmen, the comic book within the
comic book, Tales of the Black Freighter,
is tribute to the classic horror comics, a reoccurring tale throughout the
series, which also comments on the main superhero story (it's seen as a metaphor for Ozymandias' character arc).
It was never intended to be part of the theatrical cut of Watchmen, as the film is long enough,
but director Zack Snyder did insist on having it made, with the intention that
is would later be reinserted into the director’s cut of the movie (a bad idea, as it would be a momentum killer if doled in chunks throughout the movie). In the
meantime, you can (and should) see it on DVD, as Warner released it last week, packaged together with the faux
documentary program special on the original superheroes of the Watchmen world, based on original
Night Owl Hollis Mason’s Under the Hood. While Under the Hood is a great
companion tied to the Watchmen film, Black Freighter stands on its own as an
EC comic book come to life. Fleshed out to a 38-minute short film, it’s a
terrifically crafted story for fans of The
Watchmen, lovers of classic horror comics or just anyone up for a well told
tale of the sea that has enough gore to paint your sails crimson and fill a
hundred chum buckets with entrails.
The story, which has been fleshed out to encompass more than
Moore’s original tale, begins with sea captain, “The Mariner” (voiced by 300’s Gerard Butler), nearly drowning
amidst the dead bodies of his crew and the wreckage of his ship – victims of
the demonic pirate ship the Black Freighter. Washed up on a beach with the
rotting corpses, he decides to make a raft in order to return to Jamestown in time to stop
the Freighter’s evil crew from harming his home and family. In a particularly
disgusting sequence (read: awesome), he lashes the bloated gas-filled bodies to
the raft and sets sail. Here, his insanity is given ample time to
flourish while he hallucinates two-way conversations with the green, mushy head of his
former first mate.
Although the puke-coloured bodies and The Mariner’s crazed
visage are very reminiscent of the EC stuff, in keeping with Moore’s style, the
dialogue in The Black Freighter is more
literary than you’d expect (our fractured hero spouts his increasingly crazed soliloquies
with Victorian verbosity), which is an ideal counterpoint to the lurid colours
and atrocities on display in the short.
Moore's
story was influenced by "Pirate Jenny," the song in Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. Of course, that’s great ‘n' all,
but you wanna watch this for the scenes where sharks attack The Mariner’s raft,
chewing on the dead bodies, or perhaps for the red-eyed demonic pirates, or
maybe the murderous hallucinations that lead to the tale’s bloody, desperate
conclusion. In addition, the DVD contains a 25-minute documentary discussing the place of both Under the Hood and Tales of the Black Freighter in the world of Watchmen.
I’d love to see an entire series comprised of this style of animated
horror stories. Brightly coloured, mostly rendered in detailed hand-drawn
animation and fearlessly nasty (several heads get smashed open in a variety of ways throughout the
course of the tale – if you’re still not sold on just how grim this is), Tales of the Black Freighter might even
shock my cruel, cruel grade two teacher, wherever she is. And that's despite a lack of rabbit atrocities.
-Dave Alexander
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