The Adventures of Tintin, directed by Steven Spielberg, is essentially an Indiana Jones cartoon without Indiana Jones. Imagine that in the last Indiana Jones movie, greaser Shia LeBoeuf is replaced with a pleasant, studious red-haired kid who’s being chased by Russians. Then, in a sequel, which involves pirates and treasure instead of goddamned crystal skulls, Indiana Jones just never shows up. It’s ok, though, because you don’t really miss him. There’s a chase through a market that looks a lot like the one in “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” so maybe you miss him a little bit there, but otherwise, no.
The movie is based on three original Tintin stories: The Crab with the Golden Claws (1941), The Secret of the Unicorn (1943) and Red Rackham’s Treasure (1944). The plot involves a mystery surrounding some model ships, heists, chases, piracy, Tintin befriending a drunken sea-captain, and well, you’re not going to see this for the plot. You’re going to see it because it looks cool.
The original Tintin comics, created by Belgian cartoonist Herge in 1929, had a distinctive clean style–ligne claire–that emphasized uniform lines, a lack of fussy shading, and an attention to background detail. Previous film versions–and there’s been a lot of them, they just haven’t made much of a splash in the US–recreate some of this effect by employing a sort of flat style. The 1969 cartoon film Temple of the Sun epitomizes this approach. The Speilberg film actually looks less like previous animated versions, and more like a hyper-saturated version of the live-action 1961 French film Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece. You can see the trailer and compare the look of the movie and the comic art here. Spielberg’s motion-capture animation–blessedly free of the dead-eyed “Uncanny Valley” look of other motion-capture animated films–evokes the colors and detail of the original cartoon, while adding a sense of space. Visually, the movie is stunning. It looks like nothing else. I think “Hugo” is a better piece of film-making, but “Tintin” is still a very enjoyable holiday movie. If you need to escape your relatives for a couple of hours, this is a good way to do it.
Image from here.
8.5/10
