DVDizzy Forum

A first look at the up coming film:

http://www.empireonline.com/news/story.asp?NID=29355

My most anticipated film of all-time. Spielberg + Tintin = a perfect combination. Add in Jamie Bell playing Tintin, Edgar Wright co-writing the screenplay and WETA doing the special effects and there's even less of a chance this will fail. In fact, I'm 100% positive this will be a great film. Call it fanboyism (and I am a massive fan of Spielberg and Tintin), but I have extremely high expectations for this.

Mo-cap Tintin looks absolutely horrendous. Just look:

-

European comics are just not meant to be adapted to the silver screen. American superhero comics translate well to live-action/CGI, but the European comics are far too different to succeed in that way. The Smurfs in CGI and real life Gargamel looks ridiculous, as did the live actions versions of Astérix and Lucky Luke. Hergé tried to translate Tintin to film, resulting in two horribly bad movies. These comics are just caricatured way too much to be transformed into live action, whereas American superhero comics feature realistic human characters and therefore it's much more natural when they get a movie career.

Goliath wrote:European comics are just not meant to be adapted to the silver screen. American superhero comics translate well to live-action/CGI, but the European comics are far too different to succeed in that way. The Smurfs in CGI and real life Gargamel looks ridiculous, as did the live actions versions of Astérix and Lucky Luke. Hergé tried to translate Tintin to film, resulting in two horribly bad movies. These comics are just caricatured way too much to be transformed into live action, whereas American superhero comics feature realistic human characters and therefore it's much more natural when they get a movie career.

agree.

Goliath wrote:European comics are just not meant to be adapted to the silver screen. American superhero comics translate well to live-action/CGI, but the European comics are far too different to succeed in that way. The Smurfs in CGI and real life Gargamel looks ridiculous, as did the live actions versions of Astérix and Lucky Luke. Hergé tried to translate Tintin to film, resulting in two horribly bad movies. These comics are just caricatured way too much to be transformed into live action, whereas American superhero comics feature realistic human characters and therefore it's much more natural when they get a movie career.

Then, I hate to see the Tintin movie.

Dr Frankenollie wrote:

Sotiris wrote: Mo-cap Tintin looks absolutely horrendous.

I agree; I despise motion/performance capture. It's ruined Robert Zemeckis' career (he was one of my favourite filmmakers in the 1980's). I'm glad Mars Needs Moms flopped miserably.

The teaser trailer for Tintin didn't impress me at all. It revealed nothing about the story; I was nearly yawning when the CGI ship appeared. It looks like it's 100% style over substance. And the little 'in 3-D' caption at the end really irritated me. I hope it flops worse than MNM did, although it's quite unlikely.

Oh come on, how can you write off a movie after only a minute of shots? You only got one real close-up of Tintin, and even that one only lasted for a couple of seconds.

It didn't reveal anything about the story because it's a teaser trailer. Those almost never reveal anything.

I respectfully disagree with everyone. I didn't feel any un-comfortableness here the same way I did with The Polar Express. WETA broke the Uncanny Valley before with Avatar and they seem to have done it again here. Tintin and (and what we see of) Thompson and Tompson look amazing, in my opinion.

Not to mention, this isn't some director who they just handed the project to and told him to do whatever. Spielberg is a huge fan of Tintin and has been wanting to make an adaptation since the 1980s. Herge even said he was the only man who can do justice to the comic books. In fact, the reason they went the motion-capture route was because Spielberg wanted to preserve the Herge look and knew live-action wouldn't be able to do it.

I've always felt Tintin was Indiana Jones, but with a reporter rather than an archaeologist. As a huge fan of Tintin myself, I can't think of a more appropriate director for this than Spielberg. The two practically go hand-in-hand.

This looks BAD.

The eyes are dead and the big money shot of the ship in the desert looks copied from At World's End.

Really, Spielberg?

-

The reason this is not going to work, is because the characters can't be properly translated to live-action/motion capture. Tintin has a perfectly round face, two dots for eyes and half a circle for a nose. Haddock has a nose that takes up half his face. Professor Calculus has an unusually large head on a very small neck. You can't translate that to film unless it's hand-drawn. I'm sure you'll say I'm just a purist, but... yeah, well, I *am*!

Goliath wrote:I'm sure you'll say I'm just a purist, but... yeah, well, I *am*!

Well, I'm a purist, too. Precisely why I have complete faith in Spielberg. He's one of us.

Goliath wrote:The reason this is not going to work, is because the characters can't be properly translated to live-action/motion capture. Tintin has a perfectly round face, two dots for eyes and half a circle for a nose. Haddock has a nose that takes up half his face. Professor Calculus has an unusually large head on a very small neck. You can't translate that to film unless it's hand-drawn. I'm sure you'll say I'm just a purist, but... yeah, well, I *am*!

But Spielberg and Jackson aren't trying to copy the exact same style. Adapting it means that you have to make it work within the medium you're adapting it to.

For example, Batman's costume obviously doesn't work in live-action. They did it for the 60's series and movie, and it looks fantastically bad. that's why the recent movies (with variable degrees of success, I must admit) don't try to replicate it, but adapt it until it works.

A different example, take a look at this:

<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Yee1VLrqoek" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

A trailer for the CGI version of a Suske en Wiske story. The backgrounds look fairly realistic, but the characters still are very much in the original style. They don't fit together at all. So the solution either would be to keep everything stylized, with the limitations the characters faces will have, or take the middle ground, where everything isn't in the uncanny valley the way some of Zemeckis' movies are, and not as stylized as the comic books so that it wouldn't be off putting for general audiences.

The trailer was very uninteresting and the mo-cap looked awful.

Tintin still looks amazing.

Sorry to double-post, but new trailer:

<iframe width="560" height="349" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XLUis9pzrT8" frameborder="0"></iframe>

I think, at this point, anybody who says that the characters are in the Uncanny Valley are just being close-minded. These ARE Herge's creations, there's no doubt about that. And before anybody says anything, I am a huge Tintin purist. Needless to say, it looks Spielberg has done the books justice. And honestly, can you think of a director more perfected suited for that Belgian reporter, because I sure can't.

Goliath wrote:European comics are just not meant to be adapted to the silver screen. American superhero comics translate well to live-action/CGI, but the European comics are far too different to succeed in that way. The Smurfs in CGI and real life Gargamel looks ridiculous, as did the live actions versions of Astérix and Lucky Luke. Hergé tried to translate Tintin to film, resulting in two horribly bad movies. These comics are just caricatured way too much to be transformed into live action, whereas American superhero comics feature realistic human characters and therefore it's much more natural when they get a movie career.

I'm not so sure about this. The fact is the superheroes which "work" on screen don't look like their comicbook counterparts. For all the praise Nolan's Batman films got - they're still about a guy who dresses like a bat (and in the films' case talks in a stupid voice) fighting a guy who puts a cloth sack over his face or dresses like a demented clown. You an ground the characters and props in realism as much as you like, but its still not realistic. You end up with something which isn't a comicbook, nor is it hard crime noir. It's just a nothing in-between. Same for Spider-Man, X-Men, Wolverine or even the almost all-CGI animated Green Lantern. You cannot show superheroes in a realistic world.

We've already seen superheroes done right on screen. Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: TAS and especially the various Justice League series have been stunning. Imagine the Justice League's Starcrossed three-parter animated on the big screen with a big screen budget. THAT'S the superheroes I want to see!

Not people dressed in leathers which sort-of look like the character, with powers that sort of match the character fighting villains which sort of allude to comic book villains but have been "reimagined" as terrorists to make them more realistic and convincing.

Imagine a Fantastic Four/Galactus animated film, in Kirby inspired animation, complete with cool Kirby-tech and Kirby Dots, all in a quality of animation to match Disney's. It's just a shame the majority of people are narrow minded enough to ignore animation entirely or worse, cling to the illusion of realism because they're afraid to let their imagine really run free.

^What works in cartoons can suck in Live Action.

I haven't seen enough "acting" to really pass judgment on the animation but so far it doesn't look bad (not like the usual Zemekis fodder, to which I found extremely disconcerting, even in the trailers). Anyways, even though I've never read any of the comics, I'm hoping for the best. I miss the old Spielberg terribly but I'm trying my darnedest to keep expectation low (seems to be more of a challenge then I initially thought) for both this and War Horse. I'm tired of being disappointed.