Tintin CanCan
Friday, December 30, 2011 at 8:19AM | by Otter 
When I was a kid, I used to read the comic-book adventures of Tintin, the boy journalist. I still have a lot of them.
Those were happy escapes, and still can be when the right mood is on.
I think that since the days of the old Buck Rogers, Superman and Tarzan serials, audiences have had a weird relationship with movies made from comics and novels that we typically read by flashlight under the covers. Those media allow us to go slowly, to build the action in our imagination.
Film adaptations zoom ahead, imagining for us, giving characters a voice of their own. To some degree, such films depend on being serialized: we live with those characters in the theater of the imagination, and they cannot be done justice in small doses.
That puts a serious responsibility on the filmmaker. He has to imagine in a way that respects the experience of reading the work. And in the case of Belgian writer / artist Hergé's Tintin, that's particularly tough: the art is realistic in spots (cars and guns and planes and cityscapes are drawn with close attention to detail, and stock characters are drawn to life), but leaves odd gaps: Tintin's eyes are just dots in his head, for instance. The effect is striking and strange in a young boy's imagination, and it's the recollection of that feeling of strangeness that I most remember as I followed Tintin around the world.
Stephen Spielberg (Not Pictured): Master of the Iconic Film ImageWith the possible exception of the Harry Potter franchise filmmakers, I doubt anybody has done a better job than Peter Jackson in his Lord of the Rings adaptation of respecting the way we read as children: certainly not Disney, which has no faith in children's imagination.
And nobody in film history maybe has a better track-record at generating iconic images that stay with children than Stephen Spielberg.
I was happy to find that Tintin was mostly safe in their hands. Spielberg and Jackson's The Adventures of Tintin has a lot to recommend it as a film that respects the boy who reads by flashlight.
The film's animation is amazing, and perhaps especially a breathtaking sea-battle that puts to shame anything in Pirates of the Caribbean: more on that in a minute. But, like the comics, it follows a narrative formula: mild mystery and exposition justify set action sequences, often punctuated by Vaudevillian slapstick or cross-talk comedy. That pattern runs through the Tintin comics, and is faithfully preserved here. It's an adventure story for boys, primarily, a popular genre in the 1920's and 1930's when the comic was first drawn.
The detectives Thompson and Thomson are funny and faithful to the original characters as comic relief, and Tintin's friend Captain Haddock is given a true voice by Andy Serkis (who played Gollum in CGI makeup for Jackson). Tintin himself is just terrificly presented, and the opening scene very cleverly tips its hat to Hergé's art and establishes a continuity with the comics. But none of the characters have the weight that several hundred pages of comic-story can give them. It's a shame that the thing cost so much: the film was made using the motion-capture technologies that Jackson perfected making Gollum, an expensive process to do well (the film cost $130 million), which is a shame, as it should be serialized.
Action sequences are outstanding and reminiscent of Spielberg's Indiana Jones films, only better. It's terrific in 3D, something I don't usually go for as I don't like the way it affects color balances.
Spielberg and Peter Jackson, with Steven Moffat (who worked on Doctor Who and Sherlock for the BBC) on script? Moviemaking All-Star team.
It's good for kids who aren't overly sensitive to action sequences, and worth seeing on the big screen. When it comes down to video, I think it will feel a little more like the comics. But Spielberg and Jackson got this so right: the comic that makes its way to the screen should, and does, make the story feel large and adventuresome, and finds its heart in the way we fill in the gaps as we read by flashlight.
Reader Comments (1)
Just saw "Warhorse". Accompanied (thanks to two strong 20+ year old employees of client) client, wheelchair-bound after her stroke, who had horses in her other life. We all wept but loved it. Glad you enjoyed the "other Speilberg".