The bridge to a lifelong love of stories

As I’m sure it was for many like me who saw this film in the cinemas at age eight on the boxing day week it came out in 2011, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of The Adventures of Tintin introduced a whole new generation to Herge’s classic Belgian comic series. This film was my introduction to Tintin and my eventual bridge to the comics, and I have no one to thank other than my dad for that who grew up reading the comics when he was young and was genuinely excited to take me to see this when it came out. And the impact it left on me was, in retrospect, monumentally profound, because Tintin is what got me from a young age so interested and so obsessed with the idea of telling stories. After I watched the film, Tintin defined the entirety of my third grade year. I binged the 90s cartoon series with my dad every night after he finished work, the cartoon which faithfully adapted twenty-one of the twenty-four volumes. The movie I rewatched over and over when it came out on DVD. All twenty-four comics over the course of that year I collected and read and devoured and read and devoured over and over and over again. Everytime we did show-and-tell in school, I was that one greaseball who would make everyone groan and roll their eyes because nothing else would I bring to school and show during show-and-tell other than my new Tintin book which I bought over the weekend, showing off the front cover and all the illustrations of the panels which no one could have given a rat’s ass about than me. It made me learn a lot about different cultures I had never been exposed to before and actually gave birth to very real interest in them. It instilled a love for twentieth-century European sensibility in me, specifically french. But most importantly, it inspired me at age eight to pick up pencils, pick up rulers and erasers, and create stories of my own which I would spend much of my free-time at home making. Because I’ve let other works overshadow Tintin in the thirteen years since discovering it, I forget sometimes just how influential Tintin really has been to my life and what I want to achieve with it.

Nobody could have directed the “adventure” aspect of Tintin better than Spielberg. Obviously, because he is the king of the adventure genre. He was the perfect director to have taken directorial charge of this story and these characters and it really is such a love-letter to the high-stakes, danger, humor and slapstick of the comics. Even when Herge’s signature Ligne claire drawing style has been substituted for motion-capture, nothing takes away the magic and the feel of his works. I loved the film the first time I saw it in cinemas, but I came to appreciate the work put into it even more when I eventually read all the stories and the little details and the cameos of certain characters that die-hard fans would be able to spot I could too, especially in the sublime title sequence. All the performances are great, but I’m specifically singling out Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock, who became a living embodiment of this character, and even taking him to a whole other level in a way the comics didn’t.

This isn’t at the fault of Jamie Bell by any means and everything to do with the screenwriters (Edgar Wright apparently being one of them, which I never knew until today) but the excessiveness of Tintin’s exposition in this film is one of the true things that has always irked me about it and it doesn’t really make for interesting dialogue upon rewatches. My opinion, even with this rewatch tonight, has never really changed with this film. A soft spot I have always had for it, and it’s very influential to my life, but I also wouldn’t call it a masterpiece by any means. Its great for what it is, but that’s as far as my critical praise goes. Its a fun time and I’d still love to see the long-awaited follow-up if it ever does happen.