Tintin | The Adventures of Tintin.

I saw the Tintin movie last week and was reminded of fond childhood memories.

I was reading Tintin 50 years ago at my friend’s house and we had to ask my friend’s father to translate them from the French (he had been raised in France).

The movie seemed to combine three different books for the overall plotline and used characters from other other books.  So many of the images leapt to life . The portraits in the opening shot were old familiar characters. Thomson and Thompson were there. In the opening credits there was the rocket to the moon (and many other cameos but that one jumped out at me). No Professor Calculus though; I suppose you have to sacrifice something for the cinema.  The prize scene was watching Snowy drag the dinosaur bone through the desert and everyone else completely oblivious to it. I remember that from long, long ago.

As for the movie, I thought it captured the spirit of Hergé very well, it was fun, not too dark, and it took you on adventures around the world. Steven Spielberg is a pretty good director, he captured his subject well. I thought the sword fight at the end, with dueling cranes, was a bit over the top, but I didn’t see it in 3D. I hadn’t been reading any of the pre-release hype, so it surprised me in the credits to see Peter Jackson as second unit director.