Tintin's adventures in the realm of Pandora

Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg promise to push the boundaries of 3D and motion capture in The Adventures of Tintin. But is that enough of a draw?
adventures of tintin tv series


"With live action you're going to have actors pretending to be Captain Haddock and Tintin," Jackson tells Empire magazine, which has published the first images from The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, in its new issue. "With CGI we can bring Hergé's world to life, keep the stylised caricatured faces, keep everything looking like Hergé's artwork, but make it photo-real."

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the term, but looking at the images of Tintin himself, Snowy the Dog, and Captain Haddock, it's immediately obvious that the still versions do not look like photographs. They do, however, look pretty spectacular. This technology has come a long way since Robert Zemeckis was accused of creating dead-eyed children on his 2004 animated tale The Polar Express.

Yet, despite picking up plenty of critical plaudits when it was first released, there are now plenty of naysayers who question whether Avatar's technical miracle is enough on its own to ensure the film's lasting place in the pantheon of great event movies. Could Tintin be the first film to unite 3D motion-capture spectacle with storytelling that's free of corny cliche? Spielberg is certainly talking the talk, telling Empire: "The first part of the film, which is the most mysterious part, certainly owes much to not only film noir but the whole German Brechtian theatre – some of our night scenes and our action scenes are very contrasty. But at the same time the movie is a hell of an adventure."

With Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkis as Haddock, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Thomson and Thompson (or possibly the other way around), Tintin is due to find his way on to cinema screens next October. Fortunately for fans of Hergé's tales, the film is not being shot in New Zealand, and doesn't have anything to do with MGM, so that's one promise Jackson and Spielberg might just be able to keep.

Today's best video

Latest reviews