If you’re going to talk about Steven Spielberg’s latest adventure film The Adventures of Tintin, you have to talk about the motion capture animation that it employs to bring its world to life. The process has been famously used by Robert Zemeckis on films like The Polar Express and A Christmas Carol, and generally everyone agrees that the blending of live action acting with an animated overlay ends up producing a creepy end product. First off, let’s be clear, the way Spielberg uses it here is different from what I’ve seen from Zemeckis. He goes for a more animated, less photo real aesthetic, and the effect is that the creepiness is greatly lessened. And where this format really sings is in the action sequences. You still get the limitless imagination and scope of the animated medium, but because an element of the image is real people moving, it somehow makes the thing more believable and grounded.
There are some things here that annoyed me, like Tintin speaking every thought that went through his head out loud; that’s a pretty lazy way to push your story forward. And yet, at the same time it’s authentic to the comic strip medium that the Tintin characters originate from. Without all of the cheesy, expository dialogue I’m not sure if this would pack all of the nostalgic power that it does, so I’m not sure whether to cite that as a negative or not. And you really have to marvel at how much fun the action elements are. Tintin looks pretty unassuming, but in actuality he’s a total badass mixing it up in matters of blood and violence that feel far too explicit for a family film to get away with these days. But I guess that’s just the magic of being Steven Spielberg, the man that the PG-13 rating was invented because of. And we haven’t even gotten into the drunkenness of the Captain Haddock character and how Tintin needs to keep feeding him booze so that he will remember the keys to the puzzle at the center of the film. This film is full of stuff that plays as absurd and offensive to modern eyes. High five! That sort of stuff is tons of fun, and we need more of it.
No matter how taken I was by a sequence that was half pirate ship battle, half drunken hallucination on the part of Captain Haddock, however, I still keep coming back to that issue of the motion capture animation. They still just haven’t been able to make it work when it comes to characters emoting. Whenever you get a straight on view of a character’s face for more than a second or two the effect is super creepy. There’s just no light in their eyes, but they’re moving so naturally. Stunning action notwithstanding, the technology here still has some kinks to work out before one of these things is going to be considered a complete success. People aren’t going to totally love a family film that’s giving them the heebie-jeebies, no matter how much parts of it remind them of Raiders.
