The Terrifying Face of the Tintin Movie

I may be the only person on this side of the Atlantic Ocean who cares about this, but Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are collaberating on a Tintin movie.

For those of you who don't know (and that may well be everyone), Tintin was a comic character created by Belgian artist Hergé - and he's pretty big in Europe. I remember reading Tintin comics when I was pretty young - mainly because I enjoyed reading about the dog. Those twin detective guys were pretty funny too, I guess.

Recently, I've rediscovered Tintin - now more as an interesting artistic and historical artifact than anything else. Hergé depicted a lot of scenes that would be difficult to find in children's comics today - like this opium den:


Hergé wasn't afraid to address social issues of his day, which are now matters of history to the rest of us. His view of Americans, and especially their treatment of Native Americans, is particularly interesting - not to mention fairly damning.

Anyway, the visual style's the big deal for today's purposes. Hergé invented what is now called the ligne claire style of cartooning. That doesn't mean a whole lot to me, but I do know that it's quite nice to look at. Spielberg and Jackson have decided that they'd rather not use live-action to portray Tintin & company, opting instead to go with the same motion-capture technology that brought Gollum to life. The idea is to maintain as much of that magical Hergé artwork as they can.

Practically, this means that fan-favorite Captain Haddock, who usually looks like this:

...will now look like THIS:

Yeah, I am NOT down with this sickness!