The beloved character … can we flash back? It is a morning in May at the Cannes Film Festival, and I am drinking my coffee in the sunlight and reading Nice-Matin, the regional paper. A back page in full color is given over to comics, and half the page is devoted to Tintin. I ask a French friend about him. "You don't know Tintin?" She is amazed. "Zut!" So loved is he, I learn, that papers would rerun his old exploits even after the death of his creator, Hergé.
This Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell in the film) is a piece of work. He is a newspaperman who rarely seems to go to the office but can usually be found globe-trotting on an unimaginable expense account, always accompanied by his gifted dog, Snowy. Two maladroit Interpol inspectors named Thompson and Thomson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) are often on the same cases. A rum-soaked old sea salt named Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) is often found nearby. Tintin looks like a prepubescent to me, but is treated by everyone as sort of an honorary grownup. His yellow hair comes up to a quiff in the front.
Tintin's adventures come in book-length, their pages the size of old Life magazines. They are drawn by the Belgian artist Hergé with elegant clarity (the "clean line" approach). Sometimes a situation will require an entire page. Starting that year at Cannes, I read every single Tintin book, and even bought a Tintin and Snowy T-shirt. My little French-English dictionary was a great help.
It was reported that Spielberg would use motion capture technology on his characters. This seemed wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only did Tintin inhabit an adamantly 2-D universe, but he was manifestly not real. Anyone could draw him; his face has two dots for eyes, little curves for eyebrows and a mouth and a nose that is like a sideways "U." To make him seem more real would be to lose Tintin.
My worries became irrelevant during the movie's opening scene. It was going to be all right. Tintin looked human, if extremely streamlined. His face, as described by an eyewitness to a police artist, would produce a sketch of … Tintin. The other characters are permitted more detail; Thomson and Thompson in particular are given noses that would make W.C. Fields weep with envy.
Spielberg and a team of artists and animators have copied not the literal look of the Tintin strips, but the feel. A more traditional 2-D approach was done for a TV series, which you can check out on YouTube; I like it, but Spielberg is more ambitious and his characters seem more believable, to the extent that anyone created by Hergé is real. The movie involves the same headlong hurtle through perilous adventures, involving dire endangerment by explosives and so on. The chase is on to find a lost treasure with ancient connections to Capt. Haddock's family.
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