Blistering Barnacles! First look at JackBerg's Tintin

The Polar Express just made me sit there with a horrified look on my face, waiting for the moment where all the dead eyed children and Hanks would suddenly turn and look straight at me. I would have screamed like a chimp.

Animation is an art, because there are creative liberties you can take with it.. aannnd the whole point of animation, I thought, was that you could put in elements that defied reality, not emulated it perfectly. If it's an animation because it's a tribute to the comics and what not, then how does changing the style so drastically really.. tribute anything, as the whole ligne claire thing seems to be have completely forgotten. I'm sure Dreamworks big computers are working hard to get it all rendered in time though.

P.S. I have nothing against Tintin I think he's great

Edited at 14:25 on 12/11/10

Oh dear - email? Sounds like I'm in trouble. Did I breach our "Never mention Indiana Jones 4" pact?

Edited at 22:11 on 07/11/10

Actually you're right, Matt. I take it all back.

p.s. check your email. Later. After I've written and sent it.

Luke, he made Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Stupid Fucking Aliens. Just saying.

Could be, Goaty, but do you think Spielberg would put his name to something potentially groundbreaking like this without being confident of getting it right?

shit, sorry for double comment

Edited at 18:04 on 07/11/10

Thanks, Luke! I didn't quite follow the news because it seems to me like an impossible task to recreate Hergé's work and I even used to be a fan of the tv shows and the live action movies when I was a kid. It was kinda the same with Astérix, except for the second movie, it was total shit. We'll see, I guess. The cast looks interesting enough.

This will be rubbish.
Beowulf, Polar Express (? zombie xmas train film from Zemeckis) and...er...the animatrix?
CGI is fine, Pixar make fantastic movies. This eerie process just makes people uncomfortable, like watching somebody with a plastic mask of somebody else crawling up your bed at 2am hissing.

What, you want actual information in your news updates? Oh, ok then...

It's based on 'The Secret of the Unicorn', cast are:
Tintin - Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot)
Captain Haddock - Andy Serkis
Thompson & Thomson - Simon Pegg & Nick Frost (!)
Red Rackham - Daniel Craig

I mean...Tintin is so embedded into my childhood, I'm probably going to cry when I see it. If you asked me who I'd like to be from literature - before the film was announced - right after John McClane it would be Tintin.

Tournesol to us Professor Calculus - I reckon Spielberg might gift himself with a cameo as the Prof, possibly, as he isn't part of the main plot but is in the follow-up, which is apparently mixed in with this to form a trilogy, I think. I'm excited beyond belief.

Is Professeur Tournesol (or whatever his english name is) going to be in it? Tintin looks good and I always thought he had this kind of hallucinated boyish look but Haddock falls right into the uncanny valley. But maybe it's the booze. Who did the voice/capture?

Father issues would be a bit much in a Tintin film. Spielberg, we get it, you hate your dad.

Anyway, I enjoyed the cartoon as a child but I think this'll be a blu-ray rent for me, unless the trailer blows my little socks off (not sure why I just described them as little...)

You're kidding! I wondered why mine hadn't arrived yet. I bet Peter Jackson wouldn't have minded - he's like the cool uncle of film to Spielberg's killjoy stepdad.

Apparently Steven Spielberg has "personally" delayed all Empire subs by saying they can't break the Nov 4th embargo he set. What a dick.

I hope Captain Haddock remains an abusive drunk.

Oh, and yeah I'm a bit concerned about the whole dead-eyedness of it - taking two years to render pixels must be a boring process, can't imagine it being much fun and probably quite stifling to the creative process.

I'm sure a trailer - a tease even - can't be far off now.

I went to the Comic Book museum in Brussels last Tuesday actually. It's about 50% Tintin, some dude called Ric Hochet, LOTS of weird Amazonian sapphic stuff, and a sort of detective cat. Fun times.

Love Tintin as much as the next Belgian-chocolate-eating, Stella-Artois-swigging person, but this has Zemeckis' dead eyes all over it.

Having said that, I think the proof will be in the first trailer and seeing these characters in motion.