The Adventures of Tintin

When I first heard that Tintin was being made and that Jamie Bell was being cast, I thought he might be a little old for the role. After learning it was animated, I felt better. This film is directed by Steven Spielberg. I believe Peter Jackson was the secondary director (as well as a co-producer), working again with actor Andy Serkis who is quickly becoming the go-to actor for animated film characters.

This film is based on the Belgian artist Herge's characters and several of the comic books of Tintin's adventures. Tintin (Bell) is a young investigative journalist who has adventures with his dog Snowy. This story begins on a model ship he buys which has a secret message leading to a treasure.


The message involves the drunken sea captain, Captain Haddock (Serkis). He doesn't realize it, but his heritage involves pirate treasure that is buried at sea, that is coveted by Ivan Sakharine (Daniel Craig) for several reasons. The story is nonstop action and the ending was left open for the next adventure to begin right away.

This film even did a small homage to the original illustrator, Herge: when Tintin gets his portrait painted by a French street artist, it looks just like the original illustration.

The voice work was very good, I thought it was nice that Andy Serkis was able to use an accent closer to his native voice. The action and dialogue was inventive, as there is lots of wordplay and words play a lot into teh secret messages of the treasure. The style of characters of course looked a little odd but movement was pretty realistic and design and script was kept mostly to the era of the original comic books. The animation and design was stellar although as with 3D movies I don't think it was particularly enhanced by the 3D, and the film and story is good enough without it.

Watching Tintin, I was thinking the last Indiana Jones movie should have been this type of adventure. Spielberg should make Indiana Jones an aminated movie instead, it would get around Harrison Ford being too old to do the role as he could just do the voice, and yet keep all the adventure in the picture.