(WETA Digital Ltd.)Īs a Tintin obsessive on par with Peter Jackson, I was enthralled by Spielberg’s vision. Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and Tintin (Jamie Bell) in The Adventures of Tintin. They’re the fountain of youth ageing fans need so desperately. This is one of the biggest reasons why Marvel movies are so popular - those films aren’t telling stories from 50 years ago, but they’re certainly making 50-year-olds reconnect with their childhood. To remind devoted fans of their youth is the most potent weapon a film such as this has in its arsenal. Instead, Spielberg was convinced that the only way to succeed was to capture the spirit of the stories and the characters. Read: A gem of a movie: Rashid Irani reviews The Florida Project
#THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN II MOVIE#
He knew that to make a faithful Tintin movie it wasn’t obligated to laboriously replicate plots - writers Stephen Moffat and Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish’s script had combined three different stories - and it didn’t have to recreate entire panels - a divisive strategy that has attracted quite a lot of criticism for Zack Snyder’s 300 and Watchmen movies. You can read the Ready Player One review here Andy Serkis is now considered an expert in the field of motion capture. It’s safe to say that he would not have made this week’s Ready Player One - a film that is mostly animated - without having learnt the ropes on Tintin (and to a lesser extent, on The BFG) first. Tintin has always been a rather blank character, someone the readers could project their emotions onto and vicariously experience adventures through - but in giving Haddock a resonant backstory, Spielberg injected the film with his trademark sentimentality. Serkis is now considered a motion capture expert, and his Captain Haddock is in many ways the emotional anchor of Spielberg’s movie. Motion capture has come a long way in the last two decades - legitimate cries were made to nominate Andy Serkis for an Oscar for his performance as Caesar in the Planet of the Apes movies. Their movements are captured by computers and translated into animated characters, retaining the nuances of their performance. Motion capture, for those of you who don’t know, involves real actors being strapped into leotards with sensors stuck all over their bodies and faces. Spielberg was convinced motion capture was the way to go. Jackson sent back test footage of Snowy, in which he made a cameo as Captain Haddock. Little did he know that Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and 2005’s King Kong remake - both of which were cornerstones of motion capture filmmaking - was a Tintin obsessive. Spielberg, whose association with buddy George Lucas’ effects house, ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), went back decades, decided to contact Peter Jackson’s New Zealand-based Weta Digital. And there was only one company at the cutting edge of the technology. Spielberg felt that the advancements made to motion capture - as evidenced by the phenomenal success of James Cameron’s Avatar in 2009 - finally afforded him the ability to faithfully create his vision and to put his own spin on Hergé’s signature ligne clair style. It wasn’t until the late 2000s that talk of a Tintin movie heated up again.
#THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN II UPDATE#
Read: Tintin is not dead! Steven Spielberg gives update on long-awaited sequel At one point, Spielberg flirted with the idea of casting his AI star, Haley Joel Osment, in the lead role, but thankfully better sense prevailed. So Tintin’s journey to the big screen - excluding a couple of cheap French adaptations along the way - took the better part of three decades. The very next year after Indiana Jones had shattered box office records, he contacted Hergé and requested for the rights to Tintin. His curiosity piqued - Spielberg, an American, was completely unaware of all the fuss around Tintin, a character who had traditionally been more popular in Europe, and, as you’d know, particularly beloved in India - he picked up his first Tintin book, and the rest, as they say, is history. And in creating one of the most iconic American pop-culture heroes he had inadvertently reminded an entire continent of a character it had grown up with. It was the early-80s and Spielberg was, as he is to this day, a cinema god. As the story goes, Steven Spielberg hadn’t heard of Tintin until some (presumably) irate Frenchmen kept bringing him up while discussing Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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