The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse were released almost simultaneously at the end of the year, together marking the much-anticipated return to the movies by great director Steven Spielberg. War Horse is superb. The Adventures of Tintin is not. Based on the popular comic strip character, the movie follows the young lad of the title, his intelligent pet dog and a drunkard sea captain as they attempt to thwart the villain and uncover the “secret of the unicorn.” Explaining the plot in any further detail would be too complicated, which makes me think that many of the young children who are most likely to see the film will be lost for most of it. I can say that there is a lot of good old-fashioned adventure fun to be had here, which provides the movie with a strong entertainment value that nearly makes up for being rather average otherwise.

Spielberg has said that he didn’t like directing animation and that he wasn’t very satisfied with the final product, and I can’t say that I blame him. I heard people in the audience gasping and saying how realistic the animation was, and much of it truly is impressive. There are little things that don’t seem right, though, especially faces, which seem bizarrely disproportionate to the bodies to which they’re attached and feature distracting dead eyes. You watch the movie and you can tell Spielberg made it. It has his unique style and his dry way of storytelling and his typical visual set-ups, but there is that layer of artificiality that kept taking me out of the movie by reminding me that nothing was real. Some things, I admit, wouldn’t have worked had it not been animated. The dog wouldn’t have been as charismatic and many of the scenes would have been very different or dropped altogether. There was one neat moment with a single shot that lasted for minutes as we followed a piece of paper that floats through many hands and causes a lot of destruction. As a cartoon, it is not as impressive as it could have been.

I earlier said that the movie could prove too complicated for kids, which isn’t a bad thing. Kids should have more movies like this, where they are forced to think in order to keep up. I must also mention that this movie is quite a lot of fun. There are a few moments that are a little too goofy for my taste, but it is a good family film in the end. No matter how much I enjoyed it, I just could not get past that animation. Some may say that’s nitpicking, but movies become weak when we are not drawn in, and I spent the whole film sitting outside of it, constantly thinking of ways it could have been improved. There is nothing wrong with animation normally, but, in the case of The Adventures of Tintin, it is a stylistic trap from which the movie never escapes.

7/10