The Adventures of Tintin

Rating

Director
Steven Spielberg
Screenplay
Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish (Comics: Hergé)
Length
107 min.
Starring
Jamie Bell, Andy Serkis, Daniel Craig, Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, Daniel Mays, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones, Joe Starr, Enn Reitel, Mackenzie Crook
MPAA Rating
PG for adventure action violence, some drunkenness and brief smoking

Review
Since Steven Spielberg’s first adventure film Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, the Oscar winning director has been consistently redefining the adventure genre. Whether it’s kid-friendly sci-fi/adventure E.T., prehistoric theme park gone wrong Jurassic Park or his vaunted Indiana Jones franchise, Spielberg has vast experience in the milieu. The Adventures of Tintin puts to shame his previous two adventure outings, the abysmal Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and the poorly constructed Jurassic sequel The Lost World.

The story is adapted from an acclaimed series of comics by Hergé about a ginger-haired reporter constantly in search of new and exciting stories that expose the nefarious world around him. More popular around the world than in the United States, director Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson felt the time was right to introduce Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) to American audiences. If you are at all familiar with the titular hero, you’ll be quite excited about this big screen incarnation that highlights the capabilities of motion capture animation in ways that Robert Zemeckis’ last few outings have not.

Motion capture animation isn’t a new technology. Born out of traditional visual effects animation, the style has been employed in a number of ways, most notably by Zemeckis in his animated spectacles The Polar Express, Beowulf and A Christmas Carol. While making an entire film using motion capture technology is relatively new, Jackson was one of the first key filmmakers to create an entirely digitized character using the medium in his The Lord of the Rings trilogy, bringing to life the loathsome and pitiable Gollum. It should come as no surprise then that Jackson’s friend and Gollum actor Andy Serkis is on board for this Jackson-Spielberg outing.

Serkis plays the role of Captain Archibal Haddock, his most realistic portrayal to date (after Gollum, he played the great ape in King Kong and the key primate of Rise of the Planet of the Apes). A chameleon of great talent, Serkis has shown that motion capture characters, regardless of their final realization on the screen, are as much a strong acting performance as anything. His voice almost unrecognizable, Serkis’ Haddock is crazy, drunk and one of the most fun parts of the film.

The Adventuers of Tintin starts out with Tintin making a quiet acquisition at a local flea market, a multi-masted replica of a long lost ship called the Unicorn. When a sneering collector (Daniel Craig) attempts to purchase the ship from Tintin, he begins to suspect something unusual surrounds the ship, which jump starts his personal interest in the case. After some creative action sequences, Tintin begins to realize that the ship along with two other replicas holds the key to the location of the treasure the Unicorn was carrying when it went down.

While I have the utmost respect for Weta Digital and the work Jackson has elicited from them, the motion capture animation technique is still in need of refinement. Much like traditional computer animation has slowly grown and developed its capability for realism, so too must motion capture technology progress. While early scenes in the film are very well done and the final dockside encounter superbly animated, there’s a weak section in the middle as Tintin and Haddock attend a operatic performance where the bright lighting of the scene highlights the more glaring unnatural movements of characters on the screen. The facial animations are also a bit lifeless in these scenes, but as the action of this segment ramps up, you begin to notice the glaring issues less and get swept away by the most thrilling chase sequence in any film animated or live action in many years.

Celebrating Tintin wouldn’t be as fun without his lovable, fluffy white dog Snowy. Snowy doesn’t speak, but provides some of the funniest moments of the film. Children’s films often rely to quickly on obvious humor to please the little tykes in the audience, but Spielberg does a fine job avoiding those pitfalls with the film, keeping most of the more cutesy funny bits to a minimum.

There aren’t many adventure films with this much excitement, intrigue or laughs these days. It’s nice to see a film like The Adventures of Tintin relying on more traditional narrative techniques and avoiding unnecessary action and violence in service of thrills, for a story with more thrills than plot is not really an adventure. And this is most definitely an adventure.
Oscar Prospects
Guarantees: Animated Feature
Probables: Sound Mixing
Potentials: Original Score, Sound Editing
Unlikelies: None
Review Written
December 27, 2011