It's Tintin Time!

By Lev Grossman Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011
    • Paramount

    Boy wonder Tintin, voiced in the film by Jamie Bell, has been wildly popular since he debuted in a Belgian comic strip in 1929

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    If Tintin occasionally flirts with blandness, he's always rescued by Hergé's graphical genius. Hergé drew his panels in an elegant, instantly recognizable style that has been so influential, it has acquired a name: ligne claire , or clear line. Its hallmarks are steady even lines, gorgeous washes of color, precisely detailed backgrounds and stylized, cartoonish faces. Each frame is a window into a bright, simple, comprehensible universe, both foreground and background in perfect focus, with a bare minimum of shadows.

    A Technological Challenge
    In spite of all his travels, Tintin has never been to Hollywood before now. (The closest he got was Chicago in Tintin in America , where he tangled with Al Capone.) It wasn't until 2003, 20 years after he spoke to Hergé on the phone, that Spielberg came back to the project. "I suddenly had a brainstorm, and I figured out how to do this," Spielberg says. "I also figured out what medium I wanted to do it in."

    It was a medium that didn't exist in 1983, or even in 1993: motion-capture animation, or as Spielberg prefers to call it, "performance capture." Robert Zemeckis was pioneering the technique in making The Polar Express . "I realized that's the medium I'd like to tell the story in," Spielberg says, "because it most resembles the hand-to-paper art of Hergé."

    He didn't dive in right away: the learning curve was steep, and he wasn't convinced the technology was ready. Critics complained about the weird, uncanny smoothness of the figures in Polar Express . But Spielberg watched Zemeckis push it further in Beowulf , and then kibitzed on the set of James Cameron's Avatar . When he got a look at Pandora and its inhabitants, he knew it was time. In the end, he used the same animators Cameron did: Weta Digital, based in New Zealand and co-founded by the director Peter Jackson.

    Spielberg had first approached Jackson about animating Snowy, Tintin's mischievous white wirehaired terrier, but the project evolved into a full-on collaboration. "You kind of can't grow up in New Zealand without having Tintin become a really important part of your life," Jackson says. "Steven realized what a nutcase I am about Tintin, and as this test for a digital dog grew, we talked about how [performance capture] would preserve the integrity of Hergé's world — not just the world of stories and plot but the way it looks, the color and the visual style. They're all part of the DNA of Tintin. Live action wouldn't have the ethos of what it's all about." If there's a sequel, the plan is for Spielberg and Jackson to swap places, and Jackson will direct.

    The challenges weren't just technological. The Tintin stories, as satisfying as they are, weren't quite camera-ready. "I went into this thinking, There are so many amazing stories, so many of them would make great movies!" Jackson says (there are either 23 or 24 Tintin books in all, depending on whether or not you count the final, unfinished Tintin and Alph-Art ). "And while that's true, when you sit down and think about them, you realize that none of these books have the shape and structure or enough material to make a film." Jackson and Spielberg took as their starting point the 11th book, The Secret of the Unicorn , which is about Captain Haddock's ancestor and the treasure he left behind. They cleaned it up, punched it up and built it up using elements from the other books, including a cameo by the terrifying opera singer Bianca Castafiore (virtually the only woman in the Tintinverse) and a sequence from The Crab with the Golden Claws in which Tintin meets Haddock for the first time and they travel to Morocco together. You can tell that the plot of The Adventures of Tintin has been run through the expensive, well-tooled mills of an American movie studio.

    Then there was the look of the movie: the challenge of turning Hergé's famous ligne claire into a three-dimensional world that actors could walk around in. "The books became the bible for all the set decorators and production designers at Weta," Spielberg says. That makes it sound simple, but the process involved trade-offs: you couldn't just cut and paste. "We tried to follow the color palette as much as we could," Jackson says, "but we had to introduce layers of dirt and grime and atmosphere and light and shade, sunshine and shadow, in a way that Hergé never did. You can't get those colors on screen. But you can start with those, and then the real world does what it does."

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