Katsuo Kokaji / Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn
Dir: Steven Spielberg
Voice cast: Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis
With Steven Spielberg directing and Peter Jackson of The Lord of the Rings series writing a script, my expectations for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn based on a beloved series of bestsellers were naturally high.
The visual imagery in the film, Spielberg’s first to be created with performance capture technology, actually surpassed what I imagined.
Young journalist Tintin (Jamie Bell) and his partner Snowy, a fox terrier, race around places like the Northern African desert and an imaginary town in Morocco trying to find the secrets of the Unicorn, a ship that suddenly disappeared in the past.
The drunken Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), a sinister mystery man (Daniel Craig) and two weird Interpol inspectors (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) also get involved in Tintin and Snowy’s adventure.
For the film, Spielberg adopted performance capture technology to create animated shots using computerized 3-D images of the actors’ performances.
In many works, creators tend to make animated images look more stylized than their live-action counterparts. However, this film does the opposite. It’s filled with scenes showing images reflected in mirrors, water and even through glass–they’re absolutely amazing.
The creators of The Adventures of Tintin daringly tackled such imagery, which normally doesn’t work in animated films, and succeeded in vividly depicting real-life textures, ambiences, smells and even temperatures on screen.
I was truly overwhelmed by realistic images of splashing water and flying glass debris, as well as lights and shadows in deep 3-D vision. This film offers us such a rich visual world that I hesitate to even call it animation.
I also was surprised at the action scenes, which really are Spielberg’s turf. He depicts a scene in which Snowy chases a car carrying the abducted Tintin with a great sense of speed, an effect that can be intensified in animated films. Another scene in which a propeller airplane makes an emergency landing in the desert is also sure to give the audience a thrill.
But the best is a chase scene between Tintin and the villains as they go after a piece of parchment with secret codes written on it. Spielberg works his magic with crisscrossing camerawork that captures the action through an entire imaginary Moroccan city in a single shot.
At the same time, I had the impression that the visuals and action sequences were slightly over the top. Because of this, the characters of Tintin and Snowy don’t have much presence, and the story itself doesn’t leave much of an impression either. Even in a comedic scene, the visuals were so mesmerizing that I didn’t find it funny at all.
In this sense, as a piece of entertainment, I say The Adventures of Tintin lacks balance. But it’s probably a film only Spielberg could offer.
The movie is now playing.
(Dec. 16, 2011)
