The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright
Starring Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg
Release Date December 21st, 2011
Published December 20th, 2011
The Adventures of Tintin is a remarkable technical achievement. Every moment of The Adventures of Tintin looks like a beautiful comic book come to life. There is no doubting the technical mastery involved in bringing 'Tintin' to the big screen; it does after all have the names Steven Speilberg and Peter Jackson over the title.
So, why am I not completely sold on 'Tintin?'
Who's Tintin?
Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a boyish newspaper reporter with a great nose for a story. Tintin stumbles on what may be the biggest scoop of his career when he buys a model ship at a flea market. The ship is highly coveted and Tintin is warned by one strange man while another man, Ivan Ivanovich (Daniel Craig) offers him a suspicious amount of money for the ship.
Having been intrigued by the warning and the bidding war over the ship, Tintin gets into investigation mode. When he returns home he finds his flat ransacked and the ship missing. After another encounter with Mr. Ivanovich, Tintin stumbles over another important clue; one that Ivanovich will kill to get his hands on.
A Voyage to India
Tintin's clue leads to his kidnapping and a trip to India via ship during which Tintin makes a daring escape with the ship's former Captain, Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis). Haddock's connection to the model ships, there are more than one, is the key to a remarkable adventure that, of course, includes a fabulous treasure.
The Adventures of Tintin is a remarkable technical achievement that delivers fun with terrific visuals and some dazzling adventure scenes. Especially fun is a chase scene set in India involving a crumbling dam, a rocket launcher and an incredibly shrinking motorcycle and sidecar.
Motion Capture Animation
I am very resistant to motion capture animation; I have yet to see it rendered in truly spectacular fashion. Tintin is, in fact, the closest any filmmaker has come to making the form palatable, at least to me. The attempt to make animation look more and more realistic is a fool's errand. Speilberg and Jackson's 'Tintin' teeters on the brink of the 'uncanny valley' , the sweet spot between animated cute and animated creepy.
The adventure of "The Adventure of Tintin" helped me in getting over a little of my resistance to motion capture animation but not completely. 'Tintin' doesn't have that joyous, Pixar quality that inspires me to write love poems about the beauty of modern animation.
Nor does 'Tintin' have the ability to make me care for and worry for the characters; not in the way I might have for a live action character. Take Indiana Jones for instance; you know Indy is in no danger of death but you worry for him nevertheless. There is less worry for Tintin; the animation gives us distance from the characters that live action 'Indy' is able to bridge.
'Worth Seeing if'
That said, I still recommend "The Adventures of Tintin." Kids and parents alike will love the film's bright colors and colorful characters. Tintin as a character is a terrific role model and Captain Haddock's story of redemption from drunk to hero is a terrifically well played arc.
"The Adventures of Tintin" doesn't reach the heights of great animated movies and falls well short of the best live action movies. Instead, "The Adventures of Tintin" rates a 'worth seeing if' rating. It's worth seeing if you have already seen "We Bought a Zoo," "The Muppets," or "Hugo."
