Review of The Adventures of Tintin (2011) by Jane L — 01 Jul 2014

Although I understand that motion capture CG is all the rage right now, did they really have to make an animated feature about the classic 2D comic book character with motion capture CG?!

As a film on its own, this movie is not bad at all. It has decent pacing and fun action. However, as a huge fan of the original source material, I didn't feel that Spielberg made the best choices for adaptation.

For example, by casting Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock, not only did his actions and voice not match very well with his character, but his face ended up too squashed (don't misinterpret that; I love Andy Serkis, just not in this role). Making Snowy silent was a huge missed opportunity for comic relief (the movie desperately searched for some of this, eventually resorting to awkward sequences of Haddock stumbling about pathetically, drunk off his ass). The animation, like I said before, did not make sense at an adaptation standpoint. The comics are bright, warm, colorful even at night, and full of life; this film's animation was dark, cold, had a lot of grays and indigos, and felt dead. Motion capture CG for human beings needs serious work. Sometimes, like in this movie, the faces look dead and nonexpressive (unlike in, say, a Dreamworks or Pixar movie, where the animators have much more creative control over designing characters and making them lifelike). To be fair, this is some of the better motion capture CG; it's not as awful as the cruddy zombielike CG in THE POLAR EXPRESS or MARS NEEDS MOMS.

All in all, this movie is far from God awful. It's not even that bad. If you are not familiar with the Herge comics, you will probably like this film. Like I said, the pacing isn't terrible and the action, especially the chases, are good fun. The CG, while not like the comics at all, IS visually interesting. There was clearly a lot of effort put in to this film, so I can't fault anyone involved for that.

I just would have appreciated it if Spielberg stayed closer to the source material. If you are familiar with the comic books, you probably will like it less. And if you are familiar with the original FRENCH comics like I am, there will be a few more things to dislike.