Quackatoa

An oldie but a goodie :)

I actually find this to be much more compelling than The Dark Knight Rises…

comicscavern:

The Lion King Rises

A short review of The Adventures of Tintin

I’ve been a fan of Tintin for about 20 years, ever since I was a kid on annual visits to India.  DC & Marvel comics were in extremely short supply so I lived on The Phantom, Tintin & Indian comics. Hergé’s stories were great, globetrotting mysteries while the art was a feast for the eyes.  With books in short supply I would read and re-read and pore over my Tintin books.  I’d wanted to see a Tintin cartoon for years (and missed the ’90s tv series completely) so I was *extremely* excited from the first time I heard about this movie.

What I loved

• The title sequence - best bit of 2d animation since the intro to Kung Fu Panda. All the references to the various Tintin adventures were really nice, I kept trying to catch each one.
• The action scenes - it’s clear Spielberg went to town with the ‘camera’ work, freed from limitations imposed by physical cameras & people.  This was the best ride I’ve had in a theatre since Raiders of the Lost Ark. (kinda coincidental since Spielberg discovered Hergé when a review of Raiders in 1981 compared it to Tintin)
• The story - it was a regular Tintin story (based on 3 of the comics) and not a half-assed, Hollywood-ized version mangled by multiple screenwriters & directors.  If they make a sequel done again by Spielberg & Jackson, I’m already sold.
• Thomson & Thompson came off really, really well, with much more depth than the comics, but they retained their expected buffoonery.
• Captain Haddock - without a doubt - was the star of the movie.  Andy Serkis rocks.
• A cameo from Hergé himself was a pleasant surprise.
• It was cool to see realistic versions of all the classic Hergé faces.

Maybe mo-cap isn’t so bad

• I wasn’t sold on motion-capture before, in spite of it working out so well with Gollum in LOTR.  Would it work for a whole movie?  In some of the previews of the movie, the motion looked strange and a tad ‘off’ but these were mostly fixed.
• The realism of the environments, etc, was a big plus in suspension of disbelief.  Maybe it helped with some of the action sequences too - I wondered if I responded more to a car crash because it looked real vs the more cartoony Pixar cgi style.

What made me scratch my head

• The worst animation in the whole movie was … Tintin’s face.  While Haddock & the bumbling cops had wonderful, expressive faces & eyes, Tintin had the facial nuances and expressiveness of Jocelyn Wildenstein.  He more than anyone dipped into the uncanny valley a LOT.  You’d think the character the movie’s named after would have the most expressiveness.  Instead, they seem to have spent time on tiny facial hairs that are visible in the many close-up profiles of his face.  Perhaps Jamie Bell - who played Tintin - is not in the same league (or planet) as Andy Serkis.
• Snowy looked rather strange.  I think his design was weird, like half way between a dog & a cartoon.

In the end, two thumbs up!

Overall, it’s a well-done, fun movie that had me wishing for more at the end.  I would have been happy with a 2d version using Hergé’s art (and still am) but I found the mo-cap to be a very pleasant surprise.  I’m extremely curious to hear opinions from people who saw it and were not at all familiar with Tintin before - what did y’all think?