Blistering barnacles!!! Perfect adaptation!!!

Rating: 10/10 (21 January 2012)

I am a huge Tintin fan since I was 12! I used to watch the Nelvana cartoon with my family back in the 90's and I never missed one single episode of it!! Besides, that's the TV series that introduced me to the character.
Having grown up with the series, at that time I had no idea that it was inspired on a series of comics written by Belgian writer George Remi (Hergé), so when Internet finally came in the late 90's I started to search for those comics, and boy, I had a hell of a thrill ride!
With that said, needless to say that I was eagerly waiting for this movie! Of course there is some other movie adaptations out there, but truth being told, they never made much justice to the supreme creation of Hergé.
By the way, Hergé used to say that the only person alive capable of taking his creation to the big screen was Steven Spielberg. And boy, he was 100% right!!
This first adaptation of the Tintin adventures around the world is brilliant!! More than brilliant!! It's perfect!! Seriously, the only thing more perfect than this would be if Spielberg copied the entire stories from the comics to the form of a movie. And don't get me wrong, he did keep the original story by Hergé almost intact in this movie, but being the great filmmakers that he and Peter Jackson are, they decided to have a take on more than one story per movie and put those stories to work together as a whole. Did it work? Oh yeah!
In this first movie of a hopeful long series of movies (Hergé made 24 Tintin stories!!) they decide to introduce us to the characters. They introduce to the Tintin rookies the main character, the reporter Tintin and his dog Milou, who are two courageous fellas who are always ready for adventure. We also manage to meet the Dupont twins on this movie, two silly and dumb police officers and Captain Haddock, the longtime friend of the main character. Even the Moulinsart Castle and the lovely Bianca Castafiore was there.
The stories chosen to this movie was "The Crab with the Golden Claws" (where Tintin and Haddock met for the first time), "The Secret of the Unicorn" and "The Red Rackham's Treasure", three of the most exciting stories of the Tintin collection.
The animation is fantastic, fluent and the digital sets take your breath away. The acting is superb, they got the right cast to act, Andy Serkis as Haddock is spectacular!! And that's another strong point in the movie, the characterization of almost every character on Tintin's universe was kept intact, except for Dr. Sakharin, who in the original stories was never a descendant from Red Rackham, but it was a nice addition and brought more drama and interesting developments to the script.
The humor is top notch!! I laughed out loud with the drunk jokes in the movie, in fact, I laughed out loud in the entire movie!! It was fantastic!! Being able to see all those beloved characters from my youth in the big screen exactly the way I used to know them was just great!!
As for the story, well it's the story everyone as a fan already know. It was the same story we know from the comics and the Nelvana cartoon, but told differently, so, except for the Sakharin development, there was no surprises at all for me in terms of story.
The only character I missed on the movie was Professor Tryphon Tournesol. I just love this scientist. He is deaf, but doesn't know it, so he gets everything wrong and usually causes a lot of trouble, but he have a heart of gold. I was eagerly hoping to see Prof. Tournesol on the movie with his shark submarine, but I guess I'll have to wait for the next one.
And boy, I will be eagerly waiting for the next one, the one Peter Jackson will direct. I seriously hope to see more Tintin movies from now on. I'm also really sad that the film went so bad in the USA, I guess US people didn't get the point of Tintin, but I hope they will next time.
Anyway, great movie, wonderful adaptation, I hope to see more of this, and I will finish my review by saying: Great Snakes and Blistering Barnacles!! Go for Tintin!!! You won't regret it!!