Tintin

http://members.rott.chello.nl/e.visser25/Tintinboy3.jpg

in the Chateau Tintin

I've never been to Chateau Cheverny, no...

Has anyone ever read the final, unfinished book, Tintin And Alph-Art?

The best Tintins are the Red Rackham books and the Inca books (the eclipse bit oh dear me) and The Calculus Affair of course - in fact they nearly all have something to recommend them. Particular favourite is the Castafiore Emerald, adventure comics' answer to Waiting For Godot (and extremely funny).

http://members.rott.chello.nl/e.visser25/BobbieDuikerspak2.jpg

fashion victim to the moon

bobbie = snowy in other tongues

(i think i may have told ile this b4 btw)

tibet!! seven crystal balls!!

the moon ones were great!

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/prad/1politique.htm

Dud: I read last week that Dreamworks is planning a Tintin movie.

I reread Flight 714 when I was in my parents attic the other day. It was good but too short.

The Spielberg live action Tintin does sound like a poor idea. Has anyone seen the live action one they made in the 60s?

http://members.rott.chello.nl/e.visser25/BobbieTibet2.jpg

Just re-read the first of the Mooon books, the changing moods of Trifonius are hilarious (Haddock calling him ignorant).

http://members.rott.chello.nl/e.visser25/HaddockPapagaai1.jpg

No, I'm sure 'Breaking Free' would be my favourite Tintin book if I owned it. I had the chance once, but I went and bought some Biff instead. Analise the politics of my comic habit thereby.

Tintin's dreams have been a big inspiration to me, particularly in 'The Crab With The Golden Claws' where Captain Haddock becomes highly frightening...

Just got back from Paris, where Tintin still retains a formidable presence, and re-discovered my love for the books. The wife and I actually bought two posters to frame for what will be our child's bedroom (specifically the covers of Land of Black Gold and Tintin & the Picaros. I wanted Flight 714...always my favorite one....but she said it was a bit too dark & scary for a child's room, alas).

It's striking how the art evolves from the early ones like The Blue Lotus and The Broken Ear to later ones like the afore-mentioned Moon volumes, where the detail is painstakingly rich.

Tintin is coming to London. Big exhibition next spring at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

Why the Maritime Museum? The Captain Haddock link, of course.

Haddock's nationality was discussed upthread:

What nationality is Haddock supposed to be in the original French versions? English? It's a bit confused really; he has an English name but a château in Belgium...

― Zelda Zonk, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:28 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

A man of the sea is from everywhere and nowhere.

― Ed, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:30 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah, that is kinda weird. His name is Archibald Haddock, which sounds very English. Maybe Sir Francis Haddock, his ancestor in the Unicorn story, was an Englishman working for the Belgian navy, and was thus awarded the castle, even though he was not Belgian? Though Haddock seems to live in Brussels already before he moves to the castle. It's never told where he lived before he met Tintin though.

― Tuomas, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:34 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Unlikely as there was no belgium then. He would have had to have been fighting for the spanish, which is not likely.

― Ed, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:36 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

If he had been british.

― Ed, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:37 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Of course one has to remember that the Halas & Batchelor Beatles cartoons had John Lennon sounding like Terry-Thomas and George Harrison like Peter Lorre.

― Dingbod Kesterson, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:37 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Why isn't it likely? Did the Spanish own the area around Brussels back then?

(xx-post)

― Tuomas, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:38 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The Low Countries were a Spanish dominion, back in the day

― Zelda Zonk, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:43 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Okay, but why couldn't an Englishman have been working for their navy?

― Tuomas, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:43 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

By the time Tintin meets Haddock, I think it's become pretty vague as to where Tintin actually lives. Belgium/Brussels are never mentioned. I don't think the château is ever specifically located in Belgium. (I may be wrong, it's many years since I last looked at a Tintin book.)

― Zelda Zonk, 27. maaliskuuta 2008 17:50 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think it makes sense that Haddock is originally from Britain ("Archibald Haddock" doesn't sound like a Belgian name at all), but a sailor he's a cosmopolitan fellow, and has decided to settle in Belgium... Perhaps he moves to Belgium only after meeting Tintin in The Crab with the Golden Claws, we don't know where he lived before that story. And after the events of Red Rackham's Treasure he obviously has every reason to stay in Belgium.

If you want to speculate this a bit further, perhaps the reason he stays in Belgium is that he has become lovers with Tintin? After Red Rackham's Treasure they're explicitly shown living together in Moulinsart, and neither Tintin nor Haddock shows any interest in women throughout the whole series.

And I still think Sir Francis Haddock might've been an Englishman working for the Spanish Navy, and he received Moulinsart as a gift from the Spanish Crown. That explains why a Briton has a family castle in Belgium. After Sir Francis died his family became poor (they never found his treasure, obviously) and had to move to Scotland, and that's why Captain Haddock is Scottish. Theory complete.

Or maybe Sir Francis Haddock was working for the British Crown and simply acquired Moulinsart through other means? Maybe he just fancied buying a castle in the Low Countries?

An interesting quote from a thread on another board:

In a newspaper article they had an interview with the Swedish translator, and he said some interesting things:

All of his sea friends have English names: Chester and Allan Thompson (well, he's not really a friend, but whatever).

The Unicorn had rum onboard. French ships during that period did not stock rum, while English ones did.

The cannons on The Unicorn were tied in an English fashion.

Hadoque used English spelling on the seacharts: eg. W for West instead of O for French Ouest.

Basically, the only evidence that suggests Haddock and his family are Belgian is Moulinsart, and like I said, that could be explained in many ways.

I guess in my mind he always had a kind of generic Sea Captain style voice, watched the old cartoon as a kid and this might have contributed too. Anyway, he still sounds wrong Scottish, this aint Trawlermen ffs.

Graham Linehan is playing Haddock, if that wasn't a known thing.

He's said this on twitter, think it was a joke on him looking a bit like Haddock though. Everything else I've seen lists Serkis.

Definitely Serkis.

this looks ace! guys

I see they got a rocket launcher in there.
Nicely teal coloured ocean too, goes well with the orange plane.

Rong accent for Haddock but I'm still rocking up for the midnight debut screening.

So looks like the hometown critics like it:

http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2011/10/13/business-financial-impact-eu-belgium-tintin-apos-s-premiere_8733245.html

This movie will le flop.

The only sense in which I'm anticipating it is morbid curiosity, and I'm like the biggest Tintin fan there is.

I figure most big Tintin fans have a wary attitude towards this

This was an absolute blast. I'm no aficionado of the books, so I can't tell you how a Tintin fan will feel about the film, though, to me, it felt less of a straight adaptation and more like a big, broad Spielberg adventure movie (his '80s Indy movies more than the Crystal Skull, fortunately). It is a bit breathless and pin-ball like, but some of the set pieces are fantastic - the chase through the streets of Morocco at the end is insane!
As for the CG/motion capture, I was relieved the faces weren't creepy as I feared they might be from watching the trailer and looking at stills of the film, in fact the faces are generally really really good - though Tintin's smooth, rather blank features mean that his are the closest to uncanny valley. Overall though, it's some of the best I've seen.
The film plays fairly young - enough to keep the kids at the busy screen I saw it at entertained anyway (Snowy seemed to be the favourite)(with the kids)(Haddock with the adults) - but I had a lot of fun with it.

early returns:

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/afi-fest-2011-spielberg-jacksons-tintin

lol at tom mccarthy

it doesnt surprise me he hates the movie--his take on tintin is pretty far removed from the "boys adventure" side that (i assume) is spielberg's

I've seen this twice now, it's great fun.

I just saw this tonight and loved it! I only saw it in 2D though, and for a change thinking it would have been worthwhile seeing in 3D. Man some of those chase scenes were FUN!

That big chase scene in 3D was ridiculously great.

I think I'm going to try going again to a 3D showing.

im just sayin that i love tintin

bro3Die

yeah, I really enjoyed this. a bit too long but good fun. especially since most reviews (including people here) said it was awful !

i loved it; the purist in me was weirded out that they pegged on the end of the subsequent book instead of "Find out next week in: Red Rackham's Treasure!"

US reviews were generally praiseful, as our childhood reading never ventured east of Roald Dahl.

iirc Norway is East of Belgium, Morbs-- oh wait, Dahl repatriated, I forgot! But is that so! Tintin wasn't a thing in USA? I got my fave Tintin books for my American nieces for Christmas (the moon ones) and they seemed confused and bored by them

Tintin was a thing when I was growing up ('80s), but I lived in a college town so maybe...

I fumbled through it in French at first-- half my family is Quebecois. Reading "Destination Moon" in English for the first time at age 9 was a game changer

Did the movie flop? I hope not, I'd love to see Spielburg do more of them

Appears to have been a good enough hit. Jackson is supposed to direct the next one.

Made a mint abroad, $60 M or so thus far in North America.

Tintin has been referenced a couple times on The Simpsons but, y'know, Harvard kids.

damn skippy

it's a travesty that I haven't seen this yet

Not nominated for the animated Oscar, lol animators.

i kinda dug this. the thing i was most curious about going in was what spielberg's visual imagination would look like when untethered from the physical limitations of reality - pretty impressive, as it turns out.

ive never read any tintin so i didnt go in with any baggage there. it was kinda fun and weird trying to puzzle what exactly is up with that Tintin kid. he looks like a small child, but he appears to be emancipated, and also is a journalist who never does any reporting? its a weird situation he's got going on. i dug that they didnt try to sanitize captain haddock's drinking, stuff like that helps preserve the feel that its an authentic boys own adventure from another era.

the characters though, man, they're pretty stale huh? that was the big problem for me. i couldn't care about anything that happened, and i was really restless for the last third of the movie. i didn't really have a problem with the movie's look, i thought the lighting was great and it hit me during the scenes taking place on haddock's ship that the usage of shadows and colors and stuff reminded me of the covers of sweat mags from the 50s. at the same time, i wondered if the mocap faces were what was distancing me from the action... just watching these cartoon dudes flip and bounce around and stuff, there's no tension, and i cant really identify any humanity in the main characters faces to keep me grounded

im curious what the ILC crowd thought of it

by "stale," do you mean "archetypal"? I was pretty satisfied w/ the renderings of Haddock and the Thompsons.

maybe both. i half think that i would've been more accepting of 'archetypal' characters if i was watching real human faces delivering the perfs, but maybe the whole thing would've been unspeakably goofy in live action - plus none of the set pieces would've worked.

i did think serkis was a little too hammy as haddock, also.

he's a drunken sea captain!

Really enjoyed this and thought it looked great. Wastotally sold when I saw Snowy come to "life".

I finally saw the movie, and thought it was... okay. For most of it I thought it was a totally enjoyable romp, but IMO the ending kinda wasted the promises of the high adventure that the first part gave (and which the original comic managed to deliver). I can see why they needed to cut the marine treasure hunt bits of Red Rackham's Treasure, but losing that and replacing it with pointlessly long chase sequences and the corny action-movie crane fight finale made the movie lose some of the "boys' own sea adventure" magic the comic had.

Also, in the movie it didn't felt like Tintin and Haddock had earned the treasure, because they hadn't gone through the whole long journey that mimicked Hadoque's original one, like they did the comic book. Even though in both the comic and the movie the treasure is eventually found by what is almost a deus ex machina solution, in the former it felt like the protagonists were rewarded for their tenacity, whereas in the latter all they need to do is get the coordinates. Sure, the movie tried to justify them earning the treasure by adding the extra "only a true Haddock can find it" bit to Hadoque's puzzle, but that didn't ring true because you wouldn't really have needed to be a Haddock to discover the solution, all you needed was a good knowledge of geography. In the comic the treasure is not something meant only for a descendant of Hadoque, but something that anyone who's willing to go through the whole adventure could discover.

Also, even though the Uncanny Valley effect in the movie wasn't as distracting as I had feared, it was pretty distracting. In many shots you could almost imagine watching a live action movie, and then you got pulled back by seeing images of these grotesque people who seem almost realistic, but have one or two characteristics (big noses, big ears, uncannily smooth skin, small eyes, etc) that make them look disturbingly unreal. I can't figure out any reason why they came up with these kind of aesthetic choices for the character models. If they wanted the movie to look realistic, why not just do it in live-action (or combine real actors with CGI backgrounds)? If they want to it to look like a cartoon, why make the characters look almost-but-not-quite like real humans? Pixar and other CGI movie-makers seem to have figured out that you can combine relatively realistic backgrounds with more cartoonish characters to both avoid Uncally Valley and give the characters a more personalized look, so why did Spielberg and Jackson want take this route? Obviously, Herge fans were bound to be disappointed by the designs, but is there actually any segment of viewers that would find these grotesque characters better-looking than ones that would have been less realistic and more cartoonish?

Musee Herge is worth a day of anyone's time. Left with a burning desire to re-read all of Tintin straight away, but in objective terms it's one of the most astonishing display collections of original art ever assembled.

jealous!!

i want to go so bad! we'll be in paris for a week in july, but i don't know about spending an entire day just going to see this museum... i'm sure i'll go one day, though. plus, it was designed by my other favorite cartoonist, joost swarte.

Bear in mind it's 90 minutes outside of Brussels as well, although you can cut about 20 minutes out of that if you're willing/able to change trains on the way. Not open on Mondays either, like everything in Belgium.

nice one aldo. only time i've seen any substantial displays of Herge originals was at an exhibition at the Greenwich Maritime Museum, nearly ten years ago - all the pages had a nautical theme which was fair enough, but a bit limiting.

a friend who went with me was taken aback a bit by how much of the finished artwork, especially in the later volumes, was not directly from Herge's hand, was the work of assistants. herge's pencilled roughs were...rough...but it seemed to me that the storytelling was all there, the basic position of the characters, their place in the frame, their expressions and gestures.

That's kind of what I took from it as well. Like you, I've seen a huge amount of US comics art and so am used to seeing blue everywhere but the inks (such as the frankly astonishing Destination Moon cover) appear to be on more or less pristine pencils, with just a couple of bits of tippex on it. Compared to the roughs, which are a frantic mess of lines from which a shape eventually emerges or a collage of sketches which end up getting used elsewhere.

As you say though, the storytelling and composition is absolutely there in Herge's hand and although the rest of his studio more than probably deserve recognition in the same way that Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson do, say, the fact that everybody know it was a studio arguably makes him more like Eisner or Miyazaki. Which is probably a pair of comparisons he'd enjoy.

If you time your journeys properly and get off at Gare du Nord on the way back you can do it and CBBD in a day without it feeling too rushed.

Already have a visit to Musee Herge pencilled in for an European itinerary early next year; terribly excited about this!