I don't like cocaine, just the way it smells

Rating: Null/10 (9 December 2013)

Guaranteed to bring you to arousal, if you're sexually attracted to crap, "The Adventures of Tintin" is an animated adventure by director Steven Spielberg. The film was based on a series of graphic novels by cartoonist Georges Remi.
Remi's strip-cartoons revolved around Tintin and Snowy, a young adventurer and his trusty canine. Billed as "movies on paper", they offered complex (for their time) plots, an impeccable sense of pace and were renowned for their "ligne claire" style, which utilised uncluttered panels, no hatching and bold, clean imagery. This style would go on to influence everyone from Warhol to Lichtenstein to Chris Ware.
In almost every respect, Spielberg's "Tintin" is the opposite of Remi's. Whereas Remi's aesthetic is minimalist, Spielberg's is one of excess. He opens with an over-long title sequence, for example, and uses a roving, constantly moving camera which simply can't compete with the elegant, locked down compositions of Remi. And where Remi's characters and landscapes were beautifully abstract, Spielberg has opted for a wholly awful aesthetic, with photo-realistic locales and creepy, pseudo-realistic characters. It's uncanny valley hell, especially if you're familiar with the real-life actors upon which Spielberg's heroes and villains are derived.
Epitomizing Spielberg's obsession with excess is the motion capture technology used to animate "Tintin's" characters. Such technology allows computer models to replicate even the minutest of expressions as they occur in real-time on live actors. But every cartoonist knows that less is often more. Remi conveyed more with a simple black dot than Spielberg's army of microprocessors and virtual muscles. Like "Avatar", Spielberg's "Tintin" is art for technology fetishists. Those who fall for the latest product roll-outs and believe that technological objects are empowered by dint of their intrinsic properties.
"Tintin" takes 24 slow minutes to get to its first action sequence. Here a realistic looking dog in a realistic looking town does cartoonish, unrealistic looking things. It's a tasteless juxtaposition. Compare to Disney's action-pups in "Bolt". Compare too to Yuri Norshteyn's many primitively designed, yet wonderfully animated animals.
"Tintin" then enters its best segment, our heroes battling villains on an old cargo ship (taken from Remi's "The Crab with the Golden Claws"). From here we progress to a desert town, where Spielberg attempts to dazzle us with an elaborate long take in which Tintin bumbles from mountaintop to coastline. Like all the exposition and action in the feature, this sequence is dull, and pales in comparison to Zemeckis' many recent, similarly conceived sequences ("Beowulf"). Also included are a battle on a pirate ship and a climactic fight in which dockyard cranes spar. The latter sequence is dull, the former shows us two things we've never seen before: ships firing their cannons at one another through the crests of waves, and ships entangled at their masts, swinging wildly like oceanic pendulums.
Old fashioned (they're based on stories almost a century old), "Tintin's" plot needed severe updating for savvy audiences raised on modern animated films. Likely to appeal to those unfamiliar with animated features, Spielberg's tale is predictable, slow, never surprises, and his audience is always ten steps ahead. Worse still, Tintin's an annoying character (why British and Scottish accents?), soulless in the eyes, built by morticians and devoid of personality. Tom McCarthy, Tintinologist and author of "Tintin and the Secret of Literature", would accuse Spielberg of not understanding Remi's creation. "Gauche and anachronistic, Spielberg's adaptation is not just a failure," he'd say, "but an assault on a great body of art so thuggishly moronic as to make one genuinely depressed". "Tintin" made almost four hundred million world wide. Spielberg spent a little over 2 weeks doing hands-on direction.
3/10 – Better recent animated films outside of Pixar, DreamWorks, Disney and Miyazaki: Chomet's "The Illusionist", Lunak's "Alois Nebel", Hosoda's "Summer Wars" and "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time", Oshii's "The Sky Crawlers", "From Up on Poppy Hill", Satoshi Kon's "Paprika" and Yeon Sang-ho's "The King of Pigs", arguably the best animated feature of 2011. Worth one viewing.