Tintin is Finally on the Big Screen: We Still Have to Wait

After some two years of chronicling the Stephen Spielberg/Peter Jackson extravaganza The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, I should be pleased that it will premiere Saturday, October 22. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn has its world premiere in Brussels, Belgium, the hometown of the title character Tintin and his "father," Belgian cartoonist Hergé (pen name of Georges Remi).

"Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson Bring Tintin Adventures to the Big Screen" (here) was the first of many articles I have written to prepare the United States for a triumphant invasion of the country by perhaps the most famous Belgian of them all. By the way, Brussels is going all out to celebrate its hometown hero, as this Facebook album shows.

Although the film is opening this month in Europe, we in the United States will have to make do with the trailer ( here ) until the film opens here on December 21st. As I often lament, we Tintin fans are few in the United States, but Tintin has legions of admirers around the world. The idea was to build up word of mouth and momentum before the USA premiere. The strategy may backfire, because early reports are that European critics are not as pleased with the film as are the few Americans who have had a chance to see it ( here ).

Some Europeans feel about this splashy high-tech version of their beloved Tintin much the way people in the United States would feel if a European company purchased Williamsburg and filled it with flashing neon lights. Tintin's adventures, after all, took place between the 1920s and Hergé's death in 1983; the adventures of Tintin and the illustrations in which they are presented (with Hergé's "clear line" or ligne claire, style) just do not translate into all the CGI, performance capture and 3-D techniques of this film.

"The main personality-stifler," as Robbie Collin noticed in his review in The Telegraph "is the film's use of performance capture; the method by which the cast's movements and expressions have been translated into computer-generated visuals."

I cannot review a film that I have not seen, that has not even opened in my country, but I will approach this film warily. The snips of video and rare images from The Secret of the Unicorn ( IMDB ) lack the bright, almost sweet images of the original, and from what I can tell about the script, liberties have been taken.

Since I read an interview with Steven Spielberg, in which he evoked German dramatist Bertolt Brecht, my enthusiasm for this film has diminished greatly. Bertolt Brecht has no more to do with Tintin than he has to do with the dreadful swinging pop versions of his communist propaganda ballad, "Mack the Knife."

If you can get your hands on the Tintin books, do take a trip back to a time of slower-paced stories, when wit and logic were more important than noise. The books are available in so many languages that they are a great enrichment for language students. You can watch online for free the Ellipse/Nelvana television series of animated adaptations of twenty-one of the twenty-four Tintin adventures; you can find links to them in my article "Parents, Children: Watch Tintin Films Online for Free" (here). I cannot imagine better films of Tintin's adventures than these animations so closely based on Hergé's drawings. You can also "Keep Up with Tintin News, Books, and Films" (here).

Sources are linked to throughout the article.