A big Tintin fan since childhood, I have always had one or two Tintin “albums” close at hand. In fact, yesterday, in the backyard garden, I was just rereading The Secret of the Unicorn (unfortunately, I couldn’t find in the house the original version in French: Le Secret de la Licorne).
Photo: Alex Engwete
I highlight the word animation above as there seems to be a controversy in the offing because Stephen Steven Spielberg wants his Tintin movie to be included in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences category “animation” in next year’s Academy Awards.
Novelist and playwright Steven Paul Leiva thinks that Spielberg is mixing genres. Animation, argues Leiva, is “frame-by-frame filmmaking.” Period! Whereas the motion capture technology used by Spielberg in The Adventures of Tintin movie, “as its name implies, captures and documents a real motion or performance in real time by a live actor and does not create the illusion of that motion or performance through frame-by-frame filmmaking. Robert Zemeckis' ‘Beowulf’ and ‘A Christmas Carol,’ are recent examples, as is ‘Monster House,’ which was executive produced by Zemeckis and Spielberg.” James Cameron, a Hollywood pioneer of the technology that has also applications in other fields like medicine and the military, also used it in Avatar.
Seemingly happy to stick a thorn in the side of Spielberg, Leiva exclaims: “So wherein does the confusion lie in Mr. Spielberg's head, not to mention the heads of critics, reporters and fans?”
This has the hallmarks of an interesting academic debate on genre, category, and technology. But I’m just simply thrilled by the rebirth of Tintin on the big screen and by none others than great masters of the ilk of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson of the famed Lord of the Ring.
Though it’d suffice to just add here that some believe that performance capture might be a Hollywood “bubble” about to burst—or that has already burst: it’s too expensive to produce those films, and some of the movies thus expensively produced using MoCap turned out to be duds.
But be that as it may, I predict that Tintin will be a blockbuster and the Tintin franchise—and I wish Spielberg would turn this into a franchise—would soon be taking the world by storm, with a potential to overtake the Harry Potter franchise!
Judging by the trailers I’ve seen, it seems that Spielberg merged two Tintin albums: The Secret of the Unicorn and its sequel, Red Rackham’s Treasure. He also took major liberties with the characters. Captain Archibald Haddock didn’t meet Tintin for the first time in The Secret of the Unicorn, but two albums earlier, in The Crab with the Golden Claws.
But as Jack Malvern pointed out in a 2009 article on the upcoming Tintin movie in The Sunday Times:
“Mark Rodwell, of Moulinsart, which controls the rights to Tintin, said that the film-makers were allowed a certain degree of latitude as long as they did not alter the fundamentals of the story. ‘I don’t think a love interest would be possible,’ he said. ‘But when you’re transforming something from the written page on to the big screen you have to have some new characters. What Steven [Spielberg] and Peter [Jackson] are trying to do is be as true to Hergé’s original story as possible but they have to have some artistic licence.’”
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