Gerard Butler will voice the Captain in Tales Of The Black Freighter, an animated short that will be included as a bonus feature for Watchmen‘s eventual DVD release, according to Empire.

Butler reteams with his 300 director Zack Snyder for this DVD companion piece to Snyder’s big-screen adaptation of Watchmen, which hits theaters March 6, 2009.

The actor revealed that the animated short, which tells the story of a castaway trying to intercept a ghost freighter headed for his hometown, will be in a Japanese anime style.

Tales Of The Black Freighter is the comic-within-a-comic in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons‘s graphic novel Watchmen. It was announced last year that Snyder would not include the tale in his big-screen adaptation, but instead would include it as an animated feature for the film’s subsequent DVD release.

While the telling of the Black Freighter story won’t occur in the main film, Watchmen backlot photos show the boy at the newsstand reading the Black Freighter comic book (exactly as it happens in the Watchmen graphic novel).