Great snakes!

The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn
By Jonathan Fisher, November 7th, 2011

The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn is the first animated film that Steven Spielberg has made as director, and boy, does he push the format to its limits. Spielberg is one of the most confident, assured, fluent directors that we've ever seen. Even his flops are fine exponents of the art of making a populist entertainment. For instance, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, about which he remarked, "Blame George [Lucas]. I was done with this", was damned in the court of public opinion. It featured a horrible performance by Cate Blanchett, aliens plonked into a mythology that was doing fine without them, and even guaranteed the death of Indiana Jones by radiation after that scene:

Despite its unevenness, Crystal Skull still beamed with Spielberg's energy. Even in the scene above, Spielberg makes a ludicrous sequence of events immediate and exciting.

Onto TinTin. Hergé (real name Georges Remi), the Belgian creator of the TinTin series, named Steven Spielberg as his preferred director for any adaptation of his work. The same year that Hergé died - 1983 - Speilberg acquired the rights for a TinTin feature film. Nearly 30 years later, that film is finally here, and it's quite a dandy of an adventure movie.


With 65 TinTin titles to choose from, Spielberg and co. (producer Peter Jackson and screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish) decided to merge three of the most popular issues -- The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treatures -- into one adaptation. The storyline is both quintessentially TinTin and Spielberg. A mysterious talisman (a model of the Unicorn) leads the young, spry reporter TinTin (Jamie Bell) and his puppy sidekick Snowy on a chase to uncover a strange, dangerous and bombastic conspiracy involving a loud Scottish sea captain named Haddock (Andy Serkis) and a mysterious foreigner named Ivanovich (Daniel Craig).

TinTin is a complete joy from start to finish. The opening credits, very reminiscent of Spielberg's creds for Catch Me if You Can, bob and weave excitedly, not forgetting those little touches that made the original comic series so charming. The opening scene is all Spielberg. Unlike Crystal Skull, his heart is well and truly in this one. He knows just how to reveal TinTin, the character, to us, simultaneously grabbing our interest with a peripheral story of a crafty pickpocket.

The pickpocket, at first glance, appears to be an unimportant oddity, a meander that Spielberg allows himself out of playful indulgence. The character actually turns out to be quite important, and his apparent superfluence is just the point. Spielberg knows how to lull us into a movie, how to make us enjoy it just for the sake of watching a movie. Sooner or later, all those little touches we thought were unnecessary come back to surprise us.

TinTin is another addition to the burgeoning sub-genre of stop-motion animation, and Spielberg shows us how its done. There is one chase sequence in particular -- you'll know the one when you see it -- that exemplifies the fluency, confidence, audacity and simultaneous populism of Spielberg's films. It's one hell of a ride.

The prospect of a TinTin film was exciting, to be sure, but I personally was unsure how Spielberg was going to approach some of the more distasteful aspects of the TinTin comics. Aside from the constant intimations of pederasty, Hergé was certainly a product of his time (as David Brent would say: that was back in the old days, when racism was alright), and constantly resorted to tasteless, derogatory characterisations of foreigners. Here's a couple of panels that exemplifies both of these tendencies:

Spielberg, wisely, ignores it.

TinTin is a brilliant entertainment, and certainly has the 'wow' factor we were all hoping for. Sure, it's not perfect. The story is Anglicised very heavily, with TinTin turned into (shock!) a Brit. Some of the more cartoonish aspects of the comic books like Haddock's recollection of his descendant's run-in with Red Rackham, come across as a bit weird and out-of-place in the world that Spielberg creates. But this is a return to form for Spielberg -- he can still dazzle the hell out of the world from behind a camera. Even if he's not filming real people.

The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn Trailer: