By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com
Wilmington on DVDs. Pick of the Week: Blu-ray. The Adventures of Tintin
All this exciting fast-motion cinematic action-painting is rendered in motion-capture, the real-life-to-animation process Robert Zemeckis used in The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol to meld a weird realism with dazzling visual technique. I actually don’t like motion-capture or performance-capture much — it makes the characters look strangely stiff and lifeless, like animated waxworks — but though I didn’t think the movie was a complete success, it certainly held my attention. It also made me eager to sample a Tintin tome or two.
Herge wrote and drew the strip for 54 years, beginning in Le Petit Vingtieme the youth section of a right wing Catholic Belgian newspaper, starting in 1929, when he was 22 or so, and continuing until his death in 1983. All of them became wildly popular throughout Europe, but not, for some reason, in the U.S.
This movie — a longtime labor of love for Herge buffs Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson — was assembled out of three Tintin tales from the 1940s: “The Crab With the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure” (but not the long-lost, probably apocryphal Swedish sequel, “The Girl With the Golden Crab Tattoo”). The two champion filmmakers plan to favor us with even more Tintin, a trilogy’s worth, with the next one to be directed by Jackson, if this one is a success.
I hope it is. I’d like to walk into a bookstore sometime and find a Tintin staring at me. A lot of them are on Amazon, but I havent seen any on bookstore bookshelves. Or anything else mostly, since I ceased my own daily bookstore visits when the local Borders died,
Those original Herge-drawn comics were done in a style called “Ligne Claire” (or “clear line“), a two dimensional, ultra-simple black outline technique usually used for simple children‘s funny comics like Ernie Bushmiller‘s Nancy (and Sluggo) — or maybe like the color-filled line drawings Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff made for the French “Babar” picture books (which were popular stateside).
I suspect the movie would work better if it had actually been done in something closer to the Ligne Claire style — maybe like the wonderful recent French Kirikou cartoons by Michel Ocelot. But that’s a different arena, a different financial ball game.
The script — by Steve Moffat, Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Joe Cornish (Attack fhe Block) — is a little thin and, I thought, light on wit. It pales next to the usual Pixar script. But the voice actors are fine (primarily Bell, Serkis, Craig, and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Thompson and Thomson, the bearded detective twins), and the Spielberg team (editor Michael Kahn and composer John Williams) make their usual perfect-business-as-usual contributions.
Meanwhile, I say bring on the Tintin books, all 23 or 24 of them. Kindle ‘em, bindle ‘em, tindle ’em, whatever you want. Vive le Ligne Claire! All those jillions of European Tintin fans had some reason to love this plucky boy scout of a detective/journalist hero, with his moxie and his pointy hair quiff. And Snowy too, of course.
