Remember how Steven Spielberg was reportedly going to make a live-action version of the Tintin comic books? It turns out his plans were a little more complicated than that. Variety reports:
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are teaming to direct and produce three back-to-back features based on Georges Remi’s beloved Belgian comic-strip hero Tintin for DreamWorks. Pics will be produced in full digital 3-D using performance capture technology.
The two filmmakers will each direct at least one of the movies; studio wouldn’t say which director would helm the third. Kathleen Kennedy joins Spielberg and Jackson as a producer on the three films, which might be released through DreamWorks Animation. . . .
Jackson’s New Zealand-based WETA Digital, the f/x house behind “The Lord of the Rings” franchise, produced a 20-minute test reel bringing to life the characters created by Remi, who wrote under the pen name of Herge.
“Herge’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,” Spielberg said.
“We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created,” Spielberg continued. . . .
Jackson said WETA will stay true to Remi’s original designs in bringing the cast of Tintin to life, but that the characters won’t look cartoonish.
“Instead,” Jackson said, “we’re making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people –but real Herge people!” . . .
I’m not sure what to make of this. As the documentary Tintin and Me (2003) explains, Hergé went to a lot of effort to make the backgrounds and environments in his comics as authentic and true-to-life as possible — but as Scott McCloud notes in his book Understanding Comics, Hergé also made the characters rather simple and cartoonish, and so lacking in detail that it allowed the reader to identify with the characters and to enter into their subjective experience. It will be interesting to see how Spielberg and Jackson navigate their way through these aesthetic points.
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