This is a 25-minute short film from six years ago and somehow connected to Zack Snyder's Watchmen movie. I have not seen this one, so I cannot go into more detail here about what exactly this connection is like. Anyway, there is a ship accident early on in the movie and everybody dies except our protagonist. Then, afterward, the Black Freighter, mentioned in the title becomes a crucial part of the story. Our hero tries to get home as quickly as possible on a raft, but realizes it is pointless to get there and warn everybody that the dead freighter is going to come as well, a ship packed with murderous undead pirates who are going to kill everybody. Yet, despite knowing he is too slow, he still decides to get home and see what happened to his village, to his wife and child. And he does succeed. but what is he going to find?I have to say I enjoyed watching this short movie. I liked how we heard the protagonist's thoughts (Gerard Butler's deep voice) during the entire 25 minutes. The animation is nicely done too and there is a final plot twist which wasn't really expected and that is also why you could watch this half hour several times. Recommended.

I am glad that this short film exists. I am also glad that it was not crosscut into Watchmen - it would have further fragmented a narrative already suffering from flashback fatigue. What worked on the page, where you got go back and re-read, does not necessarily work on screen.Taken on its own merits, Tales Of The Black Freighter works well as a macabre horror pirate story. The story, though slight, is solid, the animation is fine, and the voicework - primarily Gerard (SPARTAAAAA!!!!) Butler - is very good.However, I can't conceive of a 25 minute animated pirate horror movie ever being commissioned if it wasn't for the Watchmen connection.Does this matter? I don't think so.

The Tales of the Black Freighter series in the book of Watchmen was linked to the actual plot of Watchmen with merely one line (I won't mention by whom, but it's by one of the main characters, towards the end) that ties into what and why the story is in the book thematically. But on its own the story and art in Tales of the Black Freighter is done in the source like a real old-style pulpy comic with the underlying lines going across the panels, touched up with some really gruesome images and a moral that is about next to none - the guy is sent to damnation. As a short animated film Zack Snyder and his team decided to up the ante on the style, to make it a 2-dimensional stand-alone effort with the translation almost identical to that of the source (save, perhaps, for Snyder's penchant for ridiculous amounts of bloodshed, which are more appropriate here than in the actual Watchmen film).The animation here is gorgeous, doomed, and totally haunted. It might be considered a horror movie in some moments - the main character is on a beach and ties a bunch of his fallen dead shipmates onto a raft with body parts falling off and gas rising out from the intestines - but it's also about insanity and an unamicable downward spiral. Even having read the book and knowing it was a sad and disgustingly surreal piece of work I was not prepared for how the animation kicked my ass, so to speak. It's a startling expression of a descent into hell, a poetic fever dream done with some striking flashes of color, character, violence, and the whole disjointed but logical mood of the sea itself; when the seagulls and sharks come around it brings some of the most memorably savage bits in recent memory anywhere. Only once or twice did the action feel a little stilted, as animation can sometimes be, but it overall was a kind of minor triumph (Gerard Butler, I should add, also did very well as the voice of the pirate).

Well, my title pretty much says it all. I liked Gerard Butler's voice acting, he added a lot of presence and a sense of urgency to his character. The animation was stylish and well made. There was really nothing done with the atmosphere. Production values were high.But unfortunately the story is uninteresting. There is no real tension. You get no back-story whatsoever. I have not read the graphic novel, so maybe this serves some kind of point, but standing on it's own I just cant see it.So fans of the graphic novel will probably like it, many others will not. But it is short enough to be worth a watch.