It's Tintin Time!
By
Lev Grossman
Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011
Boy wonder Tintin, voiced in the film by Jamie Bell, has been wildly popular since he debuted in a Belgian comic strip in 1929
Paramount
In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was Tintin. Steven Spielberg didn't know what it meant. "Raiders of the Lost Ark had just opened overseas," he says, "and all through the French reviews, which I couldn't read, there was a smattering of Tintin everywhere. I didn't understand what Tintin meant in French, or what that was referring to."
Tintin is, of course, the first and only name of the indefatigable, incurably innocent boy reporter who has sold upwards of 200 million books worldwide since he first appeared in a comic strip in 1929 — though he's somehow managed to do this without making himself a household name in the U.S. The French critics had a point: Tintin's globetrotting adventures are similar to those of Indiana Jones. Once this was explained to him, Spielberg hunted down his very first Tintin book, which happened to be The Seven Crystal Balls. He still didn't understand the French, but he understood Tintin immediately. "It was like a movie, with beautifully rendered storyboards," he says. "I understood the story, I understood the humor, I just got it, without having to hear the words." (See a brief history of movie special effects.)
At the time — this was 1983 — Spielberg was in London making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He called up Hergé, Tintin's creator, who was 75, to talk about making a Tintin movie. "He'd seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and loved it," Spielberg says, "and he just committed, at that moment, that he wanted me to be the director to turn his stories into films." (This is Spielberg's account; Hergé's biographer, Pierre Assouline, tells a much longer story involving a lot of legal wrangling over contracts.) Plans were made for Spielberg to visit Hergé in Brussels a few weeks later, but before that could happen Hergé died. Spielberg acquired the rights anyway, from Hergé's widow, but there were script problems, and he had a lot of other movies to make, and the project stalled. It would be nearly three decades before Spielberg brought the comic-book hero to the screen: The Adventures of Tintin opens in Europe in late October, nearly two months ahead of its U.S. release.
It's either touching or ironic — or a bit of both — that Tintin should be making his big-budget, big-screen debut at a moment when grave economic woes threaten the great pan-European dream. Tintin is the pan-European hero par excellence — he was pan-European before there was a pan-Europe — and far from fading away, he's about to take a shot at going global, albeit with the help of an American and a New Zealander.
The Boy from Brussels
Tintin didn't start out as pan-European, let alone global. He started out as Belgian. Hergé was the pen name of one Georges Remi, who was born in 1907, the son of a worker in a candy factory in Brussels. He grew up a Catholic and an ardent Boy Scout. He began publishing Tintin's adventures in a Brussels newspaper, and they were an instant hit: at the end of Tintin's first adventure, a trip to the Soviet Union, the newspaper threw a welcome-back party at the train station. Thousands of fans showed up and mobbed the hapless Tintin stand-in, a local Boy Scout with his hair gelled up into Tintin's trademark ginger quiff. It rapidly became clear that Tintin was destined to escape from his humble beginnings as easily as he shed handcuffs in the comic books.
(See the 25 All-TIME best animated films.)
Tintin's story would eventually be translated into 60 languages (he is Dingding in Chinese and Tincjo in Esperanto). He has been adapted for the radio, the stage, TV and the movies, though never on a grand scale. There are Tintin stamps and a 10-euro Tintin coin. The first comic strip to enter the modern-art collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was Tintin. A bronze statue of Tintin and Snowy stands in a square in Brussels.
It's not hard to see why: the Tintin books are some of the most dependably satisfying popular entertainment ever created. He's the eternally dogged underdog — undersized, underestimated and always outgunned, but undaunted. "Tintin can't be dissuaded from his quests," Spielberg says. "He's relentless in his pursuit of the solution to these exotic mysteries." Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Tintin is the one sane mind in a world of schemers, dipsomaniacs, eccentric geniuses and blithering idiots. You could look at Tintin as the dream of a small country squashed between the broad shoulders of France and Germany, eternally relying on its gumption and ingenuity to work its way out of scrapes. (In this respect, Tintin is distantly related to James Bond, who arose as the avatar of a virile, indefatigable England as if to compensate for the waning power of the British Empire.)
Apart from his determination and ingenuity, Tintin barely has two character traits to rub together, but that's part of his charm too. He's Everyboy. His age is hard to pin down: he looks like an adolescent, but lives by himself and doesn't go to school. It's even harder to figure out where and when he lives: the world he inhabits is recognizable as generically European, with green swards and quaint cities and tree-lined thoroughfares, and belonging to some moment in the early 20th century, but you'd be hard-pressed to stick a pin in a map, or a calendar. He has no ego and no politics beyond a visceral dislike of unfairness. He has no family or romantic attachments. He's a reporter by profession, but unlike, say, Clark Kent, you rarely ever catch him doing any reporting. He barely has any facial features. Tintin is relatable to a fault: it's easy to imagine yourself as Tintin, whether you are in Cologne, Caracas or Kolkata.
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."
{See photos from the Comic-Con International 2011 convention.}
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.
(See "Willy Wonka and Turnips: The Cartoons of Kate Beaton.)
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."
This article originally appeared in the October 31, 2011 issue of TIME Asia.
Tintin is, of course, the first and only name of the indefatigable, incurably innocent boy reporter who has sold upwards of 200 million books worldwide since he first appeared in a comic strip in 1929 — though he's somehow managed to do this without making himself a household name in the U.S. The French critics had a point: Tintin's globetrotting adventures are similar to those of Indiana Jones. Once this was explained to him, Spielberg hunted down his very first Tintin book, which happened to be The Seven Crystal Balls. He still didn't understand the French, but he understood Tintin immediately. "It was like a movie, with beautifully rendered storyboards," he says. "I understood the story, I understood the humor, I just got it, without having to hear the words." (See a brief history of movie special effects.)
At the time — this was 1983 — Spielberg was in London making Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He called up Hergé, Tintin's creator, who was 75, to talk about making a Tintin movie. "He'd seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and loved it," Spielberg says, "and he just committed, at that moment, that he wanted me to be the director to turn his stories into films." (This is Spielberg's account; Hergé's biographer, Pierre Assouline, tells a much longer story involving a lot of legal wrangling over contracts.) Plans were made for Spielberg to visit Hergé in Brussels a few weeks later, but before that could happen Hergé died. Spielberg acquired the rights anyway, from Hergé's widow, but there were script problems, and he had a lot of other movies to make, and the project stalled. It would be nearly three decades before Spielberg brought the comic-book hero to the screen: The Adventures of Tintin opens in Europe in late October, nearly two months ahead of its U.S. release.
It's either touching or ironic — or a bit of both — that Tintin should be making his big-budget, big-screen debut at a moment when grave economic woes threaten the great pan-European dream. Tintin is the pan-European hero par excellence — he was pan-European before there was a pan-Europe — and far from fading away, he's about to take a shot at going global, albeit with the help of an American and a New Zealander.
The Boy from Brussels
Tintin didn't start out as pan-European, let alone global. He started out as Belgian. Hergé was the pen name of one Georges Remi, who was born in 1907, the son of a worker in a candy factory in Brussels. He grew up a Catholic and an ardent Boy Scout. He began publishing Tintin's adventures in a Brussels newspaper, and they were an instant hit: at the end of Tintin's first adventure, a trip to the Soviet Union, the newspaper threw a welcome-back party at the train station. Thousands of fans showed up and mobbed the hapless Tintin stand-in, a local Boy Scout with his hair gelled up into Tintin's trademark ginger quiff. It rapidly became clear that Tintin was destined to escape from his humble beginnings as easily as he shed handcuffs in the comic books.
(See the 25 All-TIME best animated films.)
Tintin's story would eventually be translated into 60 languages (he is Dingding in Chinese and Tincjo in Esperanto). He has been adapted for the radio, the stage, TV and the movies, though never on a grand scale. There are Tintin stamps and a 10-euro Tintin coin. The first comic strip to enter the modern-art collection at the Centre Pompidou in Paris was Tintin. A bronze statue of Tintin and Snowy stands in a square in Brussels.
It's not hard to see why: the Tintin books are some of the most dependably satisfying popular entertainment ever created. He's the eternally dogged underdog — undersized, underestimated and always outgunned, but undaunted. "Tintin can't be dissuaded from his quests," Spielberg says. "He's relentless in his pursuit of the solution to these exotic mysteries." Like Lewis Carroll's Alice, Tintin is the one sane mind in a world of schemers, dipsomaniacs, eccentric geniuses and blithering idiots. You could look at Tintin as the dream of a small country squashed between the broad shoulders of France and Germany, eternally relying on its gumption and ingenuity to work its way out of scrapes. (In this respect, Tintin is distantly related to James Bond, who arose as the avatar of a virile, indefatigable England as if to compensate for the waning power of the British Empire.)
Apart from his determination and ingenuity, Tintin barely has two character traits to rub together, but that's part of his charm too. He's Everyboy. His age is hard to pin down: he looks like an adolescent, but lives by himself and doesn't go to school. It's even harder to figure out where and when he lives: the world he inhabits is recognizable as generically European, with green swards and quaint cities and tree-lined thoroughfares, and belonging to some moment in the early 20th century, but you'd be hard-pressed to stick a pin in a map, or a calendar. He has no ego and no politics beyond a visceral dislike of unfairness. He has no family or romantic attachments. He's a reporter by profession, but unlike, say, Clark Kent, you rarely ever catch him doing any reporting. He barely has any facial features. Tintin is relatable to a fault: it's easy to imagine yourself as Tintin, whether you are in Cologne, Caracas or Kolkata.
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."
{See photos from the Comic-Con International 2011 convention.}
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.
(See "Willy Wonka and Turnips: The Cartoons of Kate Beaton.)
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."
Hergé's faces got the same treatment. It's one of the oddities of
Hergé's style that while his backgrounds are marvelously detailed — he
often drew from reference photos — his faces stay soft and stylized.
They're that way in the movie too, sort of, but they also have to have
depth, and they have to act, which means more detail, to get rid of that
Polar Express Silly Putty smoothness. The biggest challenge was
Tintin himself, whose face on paper is as simple and elegant as a
punctuation mark. "We probably spent two or three years working at every
subtlety and nuance of Tintin's face," Jackson says. "Steven and I
would have long video conferences with the design team where we would
look at CGI heads rotating on turntables and say, Could his eyes be 15%
smaller? Could his eyebrows be a little bit lower?"
Once the look was right, they had to find somebody to play Tintin — to
give the performance that they would then digitally capture. Physical
resemblance wasn't an issue, since we never see the actor's face, it was
more the intangibles they were after — what Jackson calls "Tintinish
qualities." They settled on Jamie Bell, the English actor already well
known for playing Billy Elliot and who had worked with Jackson in King Kong.
"Tintin required an earnestness," Spielberg says. "An excitement in his
voice, a sense of discovery, a sense that he never gets tired of
discovering new ways to solve a problem. Jamie was a sort of a well that
did not need replenishing." Bell didn't even have to train his hair up
into the quiff. Computers added that too.
For an old-school filmmaker like Spielberg, directing an all-digital
movie came with a learning curve. "It was weird," he says. "I'm used to
coming on a set and being inspired by the actual quality of the sky that
day, the way the light is hitting the trees and the buildings." But
there was no set for Tintin. "It was just like a big basketball
court, a big white clinically, surgically antiseptic space." Spielberg
worked with a digital model of the space, which he watched on a screen
as he shot the actors. Weirdness aside, the process was faster than
shooting live action: when you've built your entire universe from
scratch on a computer, you don't have to wait around for lights or
makeup or the weather. All told, the team spent five years prepping the
film. The shooting took just 31 days.
Indy, Without the Hat
The result is a brightly colored, relentlessly paced adventure that both is, and isn't, the boy reporter of Brussels. It reminds one not a little of Indiana Jones — it has that same pulpy, retro, swashbuckling quality. The action sequences, liberated as they are from the laws of physics, and movie budgets, must be among the most elaborate ever devised — at one point Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock chase a falcon through a Moroccan hill town through which a rampaging flood is roaring, picking up and destroying and discarding vehicles as they go. Hergé's love of physical comedy is all there: he borrowed liberally from the movies, especially Charlie Chaplin, and Spielberg collects on the debt, retransplanting the gags back to their original medium.
The result is a brightly colored, relentlessly paced adventure that both is, and isn't, the boy reporter of Brussels. It reminds one not a little of Indiana Jones — it has that same pulpy, retro, swashbuckling quality. The action sequences, liberated as they are from the laws of physics, and movie budgets, must be among the most elaborate ever devised — at one point Tintin, Snowy and Captain Haddock chase a falcon through a Moroccan hill town through which a rampaging flood is roaring, picking up and destroying and discarding vehicles as they go. Hergé's love of physical comedy is all there: he borrowed liberally from the movies, especially Charlie Chaplin, and Spielberg collects on the debt, retransplanting the gags back to their original medium.
The movie is densely packed with little Tintinacious touches for serious
fans. Captain Haddock, as played by Andy Serkis (the
performance-capture veteran who also played Gollum in Jackson's Lord of the Rings
trilogy), looks particularly authentic: they've nailed the wet black
thatch of his hair and his tiny gin-blue eyes. (Though everyone has
their own Captain Haddock in mind: mine didn't have a Scottish accent
and would never make a slightly racy remark about bestiality, no matter
how much he'd had to drink.) Spielberg has imported the Siamese cat from
The Seven Crystal Balls, and there are at least two crabs with
golden claws. (There's also, oddly, a line about the giant rat of
Sumatra, which is a Sherlock Holmes reference, not a Tintin one.)
Spielberg pulls off a brilliant gag wherein a swimming Tintin's red
quiff substitutes for a shark's sinister dorsal fin — a nod to
Spielberg's own Jaws.
It's a minor, but still choice, irony that all this high-powered
technology is in the service of a movie set in an indeterminate but
decidedly retro past, a dreamy world of vintage cars and rotary phones.
It turns out that it takes the computing resources of a cutting-edge
data center to bring to 3-D life the world Hergé created using only pen
and paper. "That's probably the thing that impressed me the most about
the books," Spielberg says, "that Hergé was a filmmaker in his own
right."
He pays a deft homage to the master in the opening moments of The Adventures of Tintin.
We first meet Tintin sitting for a portrait by a jovial sidewalk
artist, who then holds up his work. The portrait is recognizably the
iconic Tintin of the comics. The artist is recognizable too, at least to
fans. It's Hergé.
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