The Adventures of Tintin: Spielberg Brings The Young Boy Reporter to America in 3D

By Addie Strong
December 21, 2011

Tin Tin

Tintin (Jamie Bell) and Snowy in "The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn" from Paramount Pictures and Columbia Pictures. (photo credit: WETA Digital Ltd. (c) 2011 Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.)

It’s been exactly two decades since director Steven Spielberg met Tintin. It was 1981, and Spielberg had a hit movie on his hands. “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was being compared to a comic book that he’d never heard of, with critics unexpectedly likening the adventures of Indiana Jones to the illustrated crusades of a red-headed young reporter named Tintin.

Suddenly, Spielberg was captivated by the comic created by Hergé (the pen name for Belgian artist Georges Rami). The celebrated director bought the rights to Tintin and then spent 20 years working on how to translate the popular European comic to American audiences.
“In order to honor the artwork of Hergé, I did not want to shoot a live-action movie,” Spielberg told E! News. “If I really wanted to honor Hergé, the only way to tell the story and honor the origins of Tintin was to do the whole picture in the medium of digital animation.”

"The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn" (via YouTube)

To do so, Spielberg brought fellow director Peter Jackson (who you may remember from "King Kong" and the "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy) on board, this time as a producer. Spielberg hoped to utilize the kind of technical expertise Jackson had applied to make King Kong come alive and to give Gollum his creepy essence in “Lord of the Rings”.

Unlike Spielberg, Jackson was familiar with Tintin. In fact, Jackson had grown up reading the series. “He was like the brother that I wished I had,” Jackson said of the comic hero at this past summer’s Comic-Con convention. “The older brother that went on these adventures, dangerous adventures and exciting. And then as I grew older, Tintin stayed the same age, and I sort of became older than him. And you start to appreciate the satire and the world in which Hergé lived.”

Tin Tin

Together, Spielberg and Jackson were able to convince actors like Jamie Bell (“Billy Elliot"), Daniel Craig (the latest James Bond) and Andy Serkis (who played both King Kong and Gollum for Jackson) to join them on a simple Los Angeles soundstage. There, the stars of the film stuck reflective dots all over their bodies to be filmed by digital cameras. “It looks like you are being loaded into the Matrix,” Bell recently told the Los Angeles Times of the studio space, which filmmakers called “the Volume.” Computers and cameras captured the structure and movement of the actors’ bones and subcutaneous tissue, and Jackson took the results with him to New Zealand, where he performed the transition from real-life to comic and then back to film.

Despite the “digital makeup” used to style his actors, Spielberg has said that he had the same goals and concerns working on this film that he has on any others. “I wanted it to just feel like a real adventure in a kind of ‘nother medium,” he explained to E! News. “For me, I had the same precepts I had on any movie which is, ‘Are we telling the right story? Are the laughs falling in the right place? Are the chases breathtaking? Is the 3-D subtle but effective? Are the characters, the relationships working?’ The same worries I have on any movie telling any story.”

Tin Tin

In this film, Tintin’s adventures are excerpted from three books: “The Crab With the Golden Claws,” “The Secret of the Unicorn,” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure.” Tintin, played by Bell, hits the road in pursuit of a hidden treasure. There are plenty of laughs in addition to action thanks to the company of kooky sea captain Haddock (played by Serkis), Tintin’s fox terrier sidekick Snowy, and the perfectly villainous Sakharine (played by Craig).

Unlike most American films, “The Adventures of Tintin” has already been playing in international theaters for weeks and has grossed an incredible $233 million overseas to date. Spielberg and Jackson hope that their movie’s triumph in other countries will inspire Americans to see “Tintin” when it opens in U.S. theaters today. And maybe, just maybe, the international hit comic will finally become a stateside success as well.