Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Tintin, the Movie

15:29 / 15.05.07

Tintin comes to Hollywood -- by way of New Zealand.

Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg are using some kind of revolutionary new animation system to make a Tintin movie. A Tintin trilogy, even, with each director directing one and someone unnamed doing the third.

Jackson said WETA will stay true to Remi's original designs in bringing the cast of Tintin to life, but that the characters won't look cartoonish.

"Instead," Jackson said, "we're making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people --but real Hergé people!"

Could be great, could be awful -- but awful in a bizarre and beautiful way.

I love Tintin.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

15:43 / 15.05.07

Captain Haddock isn't a character, he's a lifestyle.

16:28 / 15.05.07

Wow! Professor Calculus on the big screen! Photorealistic snowy! Do you think they'll tone down teh racism?

17:01 / 15.05.07

Spielberg doing Tintin sounds fantastic - until they talk about photorealistic animation and pores and hair.

Part of the charm of Tintin is Herge's beautiful, clean drawings - trying to make them photoreal is a hideous idea.

Ugh.

17:28 / 15.05.07

Agreed. If this were hand drawn animation, or even some nice tasteful FLCL style digital animation, I'd be well up for it.

Can't believe I just called FLCL tasteful.

17:53 / 15.05.07

Of course, the photorealism would seem to preserve character design but sacrifice all clarity and simplicity of the cartooning. Tintin being, in my own opinion, all about the cartooning. As directors, I think Spielberg and Jackson are good choices, but I don't know that I want to see anything like a cross between the Scary Godmother and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Somethingorother with added little tufts of hair on realistically chin-deprived young chaps.

There's been enough good animated adaptations of this stuff to at least derive some sense of what does and does not work, I'd think.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

18:19 / 15.05.07

Bédé frequently poses a problem when kiddifying for English audiences:

STUDIO GUY: "So what's the story about?"

PITCH GUY: "Well, there's this man. More of a boy, really. Sort of a man-boy. Hard to tell how old he is. Anyway, he's a reporter and he investigates crimes around the world."

"A man-boy crime reporter. Okay."

"He travels the world, see, and... uh... well, he never seems to do any actual reporting, but he travels the world with a dog. And his best friend."

"Best friend?"

"Yes, a raging alcoholic sea captain who hallucinates that the boy is a champagne bottle with alarming frequency and tries to pull his head off."

"That's his best friend?"

"Well yes, apart from the dog. The dog can talk."

"A talking dog?"

"More of a thinking dog, actually. The dog thinks. But, like, out loud."

"So it's a man-child reporter, a raging alcoholic and a ... thinking dog."

"Yes, and the Thompson Twins."

"The '80s pop group?"

"No, two bungling police investigators with similar names. Oh, and there's an opera singer."

"A man-boy reporter who doesn't report, a homicidal alcoholic, a thinking dog, two incompetent policemen and an opera singer. Yes, this sounds like one for the kids. Who are they up against?"

"A wide range of grotesque racist caricatures of almost every non-white group on the planet."

"Ah. So it's a racist movie. That's just... that's smashing, that is."

"Hang on, it's based on these comics... here. Give these a read."

[read read read]

STUDIO GUY: "Uh... you're aware that almost every single one of these books has a plot that hinges on people getting rrreally stoned, right?"

PITCH GUY: "Oh, yeah. People are constantly drunk or out of their gourd on all sorts of narcotics. Tintin's eating mushrooms, getting hallucinogenic blowdarts in the throat, boozed up by accident, boozed up on purpose, sleep-deprived, you name it. It's like Hunter Thompson overdrive. I figure we can get Ralph Bakshi in on this, right?"

"Uh... I'll call you back."

"Hang on! I got another one. It's about this little village full of French dudes, and they're fighting the Romans, but they have like this steroid drug that they are drinking, like, constantly..."

[click]

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

18:25 / 15.05.07

Just to be clear, I do love Tintin and Hergé. It's just a product of its time in a lot of ways, is all.

18:41 / 15.05.07

Matt, the above (extending) synopsis couldn't have been written without love. Clearly.

19:23 / 15.05.07

Me want see test reel badly.

19:30 / 15.05.07

Matt you forgot Deus Ex Machina - one of the main characters, really.

I too can't wait to hear more though, like which of the three books mentioned they're going to use. I can't think of any three which can be strung together, and I wonder if they're going to do some sort of mash-up of plots.

20:18 / 15.05.07

Yeah, this sounds bizarre (both the idea of doing realistic animated Tintin and MattShepherd's wonderful summary of the comic)... I know only a bit about Tintin and this fills in some gaps for me.

03:58 / 16.05.07

To simply Matt's summary even more, it's like a cross between Little Nemo in Slumberland (especially the Winsor-McCay-sees-America ones) and 1930s-50s-era National Geographic. Lots of exotic ports of call used as backdrops for simple, engaging, slightly pulpy plots.

Janean Patience

09:35 / 16.05.07

The first Tintin adventure, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, was a right-wing political tract about the USSR. Herge, who apparently used only one book for research, had Tintin stumble across starving peasants, children forced to swear allegiance to Communism at gunpoint, and warehouses of grain and riches hoarded by the evil Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin to be sold for their own profit. There were also empty factories burning straw to look like working industrial units and dupe British socialists into praising the USSR. Tintin was captured and tortured by the secret police and framed for acts of terrorism, or 'wrecking', which he hadn't committed.

Idiotic caricature and satire made up of unexamined popular prejudices. Also, in general if not in particular, an accurate summation of life in the Land of the Soviets...

11:47 / 16.05.07

I'd posit that the dodgy racial and insulting non-western-euro cultural portrayals would be part of the big influence onf Indiana Jones that Spielbeg's talking about. We're not ten minutes into the first movie before we've got Mr. I Speak Hovitos (Hovitos is composed of tsk-tsk sounds and thumb gestures, as I recall) and it just rolls on from there.

The thing is, nearly anything dealing with something outside of the author's culture is likely to seem insulting to their culture, given ten to twenty years, and is insulting to the culture maligned from moment one. The thing to do in the case of these films, would seem to be to rewrite those parts and adjust the portrayals.

Playing them for their kitsch, retro-value for an evaluation could be useful, but I doubt seriously that would happen here.

We live in a world where it's okeh to rewrite history to keep white people on top of everything, vital and ultra significant in either being saved or saving all the little helpless savages with secretly kind hearts (see: Anna and the King), Dances with Wolves, or probably nine tenths Hollywood films taking place in Africa to be released this decade), so I'm not holding my breath waiting for excessive restructuring on that end. I do think Tintin can carry on without that part of the original stories, though. I'm not suggesting further alterations to the originals (as general education systems should be preparing children for a world where entertainment often lies or cartoons things), but that the films should be savvy enough to adapt without the more xenophobic material. Drunk delusional sailors and adventurin' mannish boy reporters are enough all on their own.

Quick question: several sources tell me the dog's original name was offensive, but don't tell me why or a translation. What was the dog originally called and why the offense? I'm sure it'll be obvious once explained, but nothing I've seen online does a clear job, being written by fans who just assume you know.

11:55 / 16.05.07

According to Wikipedia, Snowy's original name Milou "was named after Hergé's first girlfriend, a contraction of the name Marie-Louise ("Malou")."

12:01 / 16.05.07

And I tried actually looking up 'Milou' in several online translation thingies to no use. Is the 'offense' a myth, perhaps? Like the one about Elvis and the only black people could do for him? It would explain the lack of evidence.

MattShepherd: I WEDDED KALI!

13:18 / 16.05.07

My French colleagues tell me that "Milou" means nothing at all, besides being a quasi-popular name for a dog. And it's always been "Snowy" in English, IIRC.

13:43 / 16.05.07

A Tintin trilogy

I'm confused about this too. I think they'll do three two-parters, like Secret of the Unicorn-Red Rackham's treasure, Seven Crystal Balls-Prisoners of the Sun, ... actually they could do the Crab with the Golden Claws first, then those, and it would be in order starting with the introduction of teh Haddock.