Lost in the Plot

Variety reported yesterday that Tintin is finally headed for the big screen, after many false starts, in animated form at the hands of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson. All the hallmarks of expensive, lifeless, misguided animation seem present- ‘cutting-edge’ motion capture technology, an obsessive emphasis on photorealism, live-action directors with a spot in their shooting schedule for a vanity project (hey, might as well be animated, right?), iconic and artistically successful visual material ripe for a Hollywood ‘re-imagining’. Top that all off with the suspicious ‘trilogy’ idea; since there are numerouns Tintin stories to adapt into endless sequels, the project is perfect in the current movie-as-franchise climate. The article explains

“Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are teaming to direct and produce three back-to-back features based on Georges Remi’s beloved Belgian comic-strip hero Tintin for DreamWorks. Pics will be produced in full digital 3-D using performance capture technology”.

The horror continues-

“Jackson said WETA will stay true to Remi’s original designs in bringing the cast of Tintin to life, but that the characters won’t look cartoonish. ‘Instead,’ Jackson said, ‘we’re making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people - but real Herge people!’”.

Sounds about as interesting as a feature length Gap/Max-Factor/Pantene commercial. In extreme close-up. It may have worked for Gollum, and I’m not universally against the goal of realistic computer animation, but Peter Jackson has his priorities confused here - I can’t recall the last time I saw a movie and cared about the character’s pores or individual hairs.

Mark Mayerson is spot on in his blog post on the matter, observing that Jackson and Spielberg seem to think they’re

“adding all the details that Herge was too stupid to include. What a shame that Herge didn’t live long enough to see his work corrected. I look forward to the day when Spielberg and Jackson have their work corrected as well.”

The information available so far doesn’t bode well for the project. It’s so sad that live-action directors who are generally very talented venture into animation with massive budgets at their disposal, genuinely exciting stories and characters to work with, but end up (perhaps not surprisingly) missing the point completely. If they do make a trilogy, it’ll be several hundred million dollars directed away from more inspired animation projects, and potentially another massive step backwards in the story of intelligent computer animation, as well as animation generally.