The Adventures of Tintin
Village East Cinema, January 30, 2012
Movie #8 for 2012
Despite the awesomeness of the crew who wrote The Adventures of Tintin (STEVEN MOFFAT, EDGAR WRIGHT and JOE CORNISH), I did not have high hopes for it.
Folks talk about the uncanny valley in animation where that fiction between realistic and cartoonish features becomes uncomfortable to watch. Tintin had that, but for me it was not about the appearance of the characters (although that was fairly awkward at times - Bianca Castefiori is so photoreal that she looks, for all the world, like a person wearing hideously bad face prosthetics.), but rather about the narrative and storytelling.
Speilberg went for realistic over cartoony - in both the animation style and the action - and it sheds a new - and slightly shocking - light on familiar content. Tintin looked so wrong carrying a gun, that it took a minute to remember that he gets shot at all the time in the books. And then there’s the climactic crane fight. It’s so silly that I can believe that’s something Herge would have written, but Speilberg makes the movement and sound of the cranes so real that it makes it not so much silly as stupid and, oddly, highlights how unrealistic it is.
I think, in general, there was one too many books wrapped into the story; one too many ridiculous plot devices; one too many absurd action scenes; one too many drawn out expositionary flashbacks and one too many self-referential nudge-nudges. What there was instead was pretty awesome animation; great acting by JAMIE BELL and ANDY SERKIS (both pictured); one jawdroppingly awesome shot of a ship sailing through the desert; one genuinely thrilling action sequence and a nice - if short - funny Thompson and Thomson moment.
My hopes were not high, but they were met.
