Tintin Movie

The countdown begins! If you're a fan of Hergé's The Adventures Of Tintin, mark the date on your calendar, or put it into that poncy phone of yours if you're over the whole 'writing on paper' thing. Today makes one year until the release of Steven Spielberg's film The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn. (Actually, Wikipedia says the release date is December 23, Empire magazine says December 26. I'm going with Empire because it was printed in Australia.)

Am I a Tintin fan? Am I heck as like! It was what got me into making my own comics in the first place. I have all the books, yes, even the Lake Of Sharks one that was based on a French cartoon no one's even flippin' seen. One of them I had to get on Amazon. The timespan in getting all the books you see in the picture below was 13 years. But enough about that. My previous encounters with the other Tintin films made has been pretty dismal. I've never seen the Blue Oranges one, and the one time the Golden Fleece one was on SBS, I had to tape it and the tape wasn't worth watching because the reception was so bad.

Come Boxing Day next year, though, the 3-D animated film will be out, the animation done through motion capture. The photorealistic look of the characters as shown in Empire is really impressive; they look like real people and Hergé's cartoon characters at the same time, and given Hergé's attention to backdround detail in the comics and his theatrical sense of drawing settings, the film is something to really look forward to. So let the countdown begin –

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