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No Love Interest for Tintin
by Richard Horgan |
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5/15/2007 at 5:23:35 PM |
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Indiana Jones had Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen); Luke Skywalker had Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher). But there will be no honey bunny for Tintin in the first of three motion capture animation films now being planned for 2009 release by the formidable tandem of Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg.
This according to an anonymous Moulinsart estate company source quoted in London’s The Times newspaper. Says he or she: “I’m sure the accountants in Hollywood would love some of that in there, but they can’t do it. We have approval over that just to make sure they don’t totally ruin it . . . But there is room for some artistic license.”
This is the reason Tintin’s path to blockbuster filmmaking has been so slippery, like author George Rémi’s pen name of Hergé, which comes from the pronunciation of his initials G.R. when read backwards in French, e.g. R.G. In between the rights to the property lapsing at the Spielberg end, others came a courting. But none could promise Rémi’s widow and co. sufficient creative control. So in the end, Spielberg won out with an arrangement that is much like the one billionaire author J.K. Rowling has with Warner Bros for the Harry Potter films.
As reverential towards Hergé’s hallowed 23 installments as Spielberg and Jackson are, they may still want to track down (or re-watch) the 1995 French documentary Hollywood Moulinsart: Tintin and Cinema. Made by Benoît Peeters, a Frenchman and Hergé specialist who moved to Rémi’s native Belgium in the late 1970’s, it examines some of the reasons why the property has been so hard to adapt for the big screen.
Of course, that was then and this is now. Here’s how Spielberg, in Monday’s Daily Variety news article, described the 20-minute test reel of Tintin motion capture footage put together by the miracle workers at Jackson’s F/X house WETA: “Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer animated characters.”
If you grew up in Quebec, as I did, or anywhere else in the French-speaking world, Tintin in these places is like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman combined. He’s H-U-G-E. The decision to go motion capture instead of live action is the right one, I think, and with Rémi’s widow Fanny Rodwell and new husband Nick watching over it all in the name of Hergé Studios, one of the last untapped comic book franchises would seem to have a pretty good shot at trilogy greatness.
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