{"id":6444,"date":"2011-12-27T10:37:40","date_gmt":"2011-12-27T00:37:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=6444"},"modified":"2014-05-03T17:52:44","modified_gmt":"2014-05-03T07:52:44","slug":"the-adventures-of-tintin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=6444","title":{"rendered":"The Adventures Of Tintin"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"tintinposter\"<\/a><\/p>\n

If you can believe it, Tintin<\/em> creator Herge first gave his blessing for Steven Spielberg to produce a film based on his beloved Tintin comic book series back in 1983.\u00a0 And here we are in December 2011, nearly three decades later and the boy adventurer has finally arrived on the big screen.<\/p>\n

After years in film development purgatory, the Tintin<\/em> script that was eventually selected by Spielberg was a screenplay written by Joe Cornish (Hanna, Attack The Block<\/em>) that melds The Crab With The Golden Claws<\/em> and The Secret of The Unicorn<\/em>.\u00a0 Although they are the 9th and 11th books in the series respectively, they make a sensible starting point for a film as it serves as an introduction to Captain Haddock who would become an integral character in the series.<\/p>\n

We begin our story at a flea market where our heroic investigative reporter Tintin is posing for a portrait by a street artist.\u00a0 The artist sketches his tuft of hair, a little ‘c’ shape for the nose and black dots for eyes to reveal…the Tintin we are all familiar with from the comics.\u00a0 Although done as a gag, I believe this scene is also there to help audiences adjust from the comic book art form they are familiar with to the cinematic approach Spielberg has chosen to go with – an interesting blend of hyper realistic texturing and motion capturing that is then applied to caricatured faces.\u00a0 It’s certainly a unique visual style that I’ve not seen before and works out rather effectively.\u00a0 No one I know has exited the film complaining about uncanny valley.<\/p>\n

An interesting and presumably conscious choice by Spielberg is the decision not to put a date or location to the film.\u00a0 Instead he has opted to give the film the broad appearance of being set somewhere in Europe in the mid 20th Century.\u00a0 The world of Tintin is populated by top hats, canes, classic cars and cobblestone streets.\u00a0 Whats notable by their absense is any sign of technology.\u00a0 There are no mobile phones, no televisions and no Internet.\u00a0 It gives the film a very distinct setting compared to your run-of-the-mill children’s adventure film.<\/p>\n

So does it work?\u00a0 Sort of.\u00a0 Mostly.\u00a0 I believe Spielberg has nailed the key ingredients for what I would want in a big screen Tintin<\/em> film.\u00a0 Let me explain.\u00a0 What I didn’t want was a frame-for-frame adaptation of the comics that used the exact same art style as Herge.\u00a0 The reason I don’t want that is because it already exists<\/em>.\u00a0 The Ellipse animation company produced a series called The Adventures of Tintin<\/em> in 1991 that does precisely this.<\/p>\n

Tintin<\/em> is very much a product of its time and I was pleased that Spielberg didn’t neuter some of the elements that would seem uncommon in a children’s film today.\u00a0 Tintin does use a firearm.\u00a0 Captain Haddock is a full blown alcoholic when we meet him.\u00a0 The only consession that I can see is that his love of tobacco seems to be cut but I can appreciate that this is probably due to a classification system that would not allow children to see the film otherwise.\u00a0 Thinking about it, it seems odd that over time, a hero in an All Ages film firing a gun is passable but smoking a pipe is a no-no.<\/p>\n

What I did want from a Tintin <\/em>adaptation was a film that captured the essence of the series – its exhuberance and love of adventure – but left room for the director to make it their own and this is exactly what I got.\u00a0 There are memorable scenes from the comics such as Tintin and Haddock’s desperate battle with a seaplane but many of the funny one liners and high octane action set pieces are entirely of Spielberg and Cornish’s own doing.<\/p>\n

So what doesn’t work?\u00a0 The pacing.\u00a0 The film suffers a bit from Pirates of the Caribbean<\/em> syndrome.\u00a0 It’s about fifteen minutes longer than it should be and an over-reliance on action scenes can fatigue the viewer so that by the end of the film, when Tintin and Captain Haddock are fighting with the villanious Sakharine inside two cranes, the overwhelming feeling is one of exhaustion rather than exhileration.<\/p>\n

Having said that, I’m not going to complain too much here.\u00a0 It’s a big budget Tintin<\/em> movie made by some of the biggest names in Hollywood.\u00a0 As a big Tintin<\/em> fan, I should be so lucky.\u00a0 Having made a quarter of a billion dollars at the box office, a sequel seems assured and rumours online appear to suggest that a third film is being considered too.\u00a0 I just hope at some stage the creators get a chance to adapt The Seven Crystal Balls<\/em> & Prisoners Of The Sun<\/em>, which are my personal favourites in the Tintin<\/em> series.\u00a0 As it stands, The Adventures Of Tintin<\/em> isn’t flawless but its not too shabby either.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Billions of blistering blue barnacles<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":6445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[378,902,900],"class_list":["post-6444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-films","tag-peter-jackson","tag-steven-spielberg","tag-tintin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6444"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14300,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444\/revisions\/14300"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}