I grew up reading the adventures of Belgian reporter Tintin; he was as much a part of my childhood as Spider-Man, Batman or the Hulk. I was therefore excited to hear a few years ago that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson would finally be bringing him to the big screen. That the duo have hired British actors Jamie Bell as Tintin and Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock and the writers of the popular British TV show Dr. Who, goes to show that they're ready to go the extra mile to infuse the story with the distinctly European sensibility for which the character and his world are known.
The thing is, I'm not necessarily thrilled by the format Spielberg has chosen to tell his story. I know that I am but one of a long line of bloggers, armchair experts, moviegoers and Tintin fans not thrilled with the prospect of yet another dead-eyed, chillingly artificial adventure in the vein of Beowulf and The Polar Express, but with the release of The Adventures of Tintin merely weeks away (it opens in the Philippines on November 30, 2011), I find myself willing to get in line for yet another "Motion Capture" movie.
Motion capture is really such a tricky proposition. As someone who's sat through the progenitor of all of these recent movies, The Polar Express, with my children through multiple viewings on DVD (and one in the theater), I know how difficult it can be to endure. I found Robert Zemeckis' follow-up to that film, Beowulf to be just creepy, and even though I respected Zemeckis' vision for A Christmas Carol, which had already been done in just about every other format, I still found it difficult and at times terrifying to watch, even with some virtuoso performances from the actors involved in that process. Ominously, Disney, the parent studio of Zemeckis' Imagemovers outfit has shut down the studio after its latest effort, Mars Needs Moms, tanked at the box-office and has permanently scrapped Zemeckis' plans to produce a mo-cap version of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine movie.
It strikes me that audiences aren't violently opposed to motion capture as an aid to storytelling, as shown by the unparalleled box-office returns of James Cameron's mo-cap-heavy, live-action sci-fi spectacle Avatar, as well as Jackson's own Lord of the Rings trilogy, which featured an entirely digitally-rendered mo-cap character in Gollum, but apparently what really unsettles audiences is to do away with human characters completely and to replace them with the strange approximations of them that mo-cap characters often are.
It's not like pure animation where the stand-ins for humans are, well, conspicuously distinct from humans; after bloggers (and maybe some professional reviewers to boot), have written whole treatises on the subject of the "uncanny valley" and how the phenomenon tends to occur most commonly in mo-cap films, one wonders why Spielberg and Jackson would take the risks that they have, although Jackson's success in the format (as evidenced by Gollum and later, King Kong, both portrayed by Serkis) speaks for itself.
Of course, since Tintin was well-into production when Mars Needs Moms tanked, and millions of dollars had already been spent, the makers were fully committed to seeing the project through, no matter how ominous it is that The Adventures of Tintin is the first mo-cap project to hit screens since rival studio Disney threw in the towel and shut down Imagemovers. Apparently, the perceived risk on Tintin is so high that two studios had to finance it and split global territories more or less equally, which is a departure from the usual practice of one studio distributing the film in the United States and Canada and the other studio distributing it in the rest of the world.
The reviews that are trickling in and the reports of box-office success as the film rolls out slowly around the world (as opposed to one big global premiere as is usually done for Harry Potter or superhero movies), are encouraging, but I'm still on tenterhooks as to whether this film will be the breakout hit I'm hoping it will be, or whether or not I'll enjoy it, which I'm dearly hoping I will.
I suppose one could say that if anyone could make this work, it would be Spielberg and Jackson, but really, with something as big as Tintin the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Here's hoping they're able to vault across that uncanny valley; that in itself would be one of Tintin's greatest adventures ever.
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