Red Rackham's treasure is an iconic moment in the adventures of Tintin - it is where Tintin meets Professor Calculus, learns about the legacy of the Haddocks, and embarks on a treasure hunt that lands Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus with the Marlinspike estate, which is an important primary setting for the subsequent books.
It is also one of the funniest comments I have ever read.
Hergé has a knack for creating humour not out of situations but out of characters. All the slapstick-y stuff that happens to Captain Haddock serves to add emphasis to his firecracker personality, all of Professor Calculus' humourous misconstructions about what other people are saying serve to underline his I'm-a-spaced-out-scientist personality. And Snowy is a dog, and as all dog, is completely, adorably crazy.
It would be interesting to see how Moffat has used this humour inducing technique in his screenplay. Has he stayed true to Hergé's involvement with the characters or has he created situation humour? I don't suppose the latter will be too bad, but I do hope he has stayed true to Hergé's style.
We'll have to wait and see.
Things I want to see in the next trailer:
Captain Haddock
Professor Calculus
Thomson and Thompson
Professor Calculus' Shark Machine
More explosions and crashes
Arrividerla!
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Tintin Cartoons
A bloke who calls himself EntertainmentTV2996 has posted all the Tintin TV cartoons on Youtube, and I have been watching them for lack of anything better to do.
My favourite is Tintin and the Picaros, a brilliant adaptation of one of my favourite books. General Alcazar is hilarious, with a voice and mannerisms that beautifully correlate to one's expectations from reading the book, but more importantly, General Alcazar's wife, Peggy, has been created brilliantly. A stroke of genius to model her after an overbearing Floridian housewife!
You can watch it here:
or check out EntertainmentTV2996's Youtube Channel for more.
Enjoy!
My favourite is Tintin and the Picaros, a brilliant adaptation of one of my favourite books. General Alcazar is hilarious, with a voice and mannerisms that beautifully correlate to one's expectations from reading the book, but more importantly, General Alcazar's wife, Peggy, has been created brilliantly. A stroke of genius to model her after an overbearing Floridian housewife!
You can watch it here:
or check out EntertainmentTV2996's Youtube Channel for more.
Enjoy!
The Tintin Movie
So, the Tintin teaser trailer was released on May 16th, and ever since then, I haven't been able to stop thinking Tintin. I have watched the trailer about a million and six times now, and have analyzed every single thing there is in those one minute and twelve seconds of footage.
You can watch the trailer here.
I would embed the Youtube video here, but the one thats on there isn't as good as the IMDb one.
The Adventures of Tintin, which releases in the United States on the twenty-third of December, is a motion capture film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy.
The film is an adaptation of The Crab with the Golden Claws (which is the book in which Tintin meets Captain Haddock and uncovers a gang of opium smugglers), The Secret of the Unicorn (in which Tintin learns that the Unicorn, a ship captained by one of Captain Haddock's ancestors contained a great deal of treasure and was, as a result, ransacked by the pirate Red Rackham) and Red Rackham's Treasure (in which Tintin and his friends set about on a treasure hunt to uncover the lost cargo of the Unicorn).
In the trailer, we catch a glimps of Thomson and Thompson, the two bumbling detectives, Snowy (who's cooler, Belgian name is Milou) and the villain, Ivan Ivanovtich Sakharine. Unfortunately, we do not see much of Captain Haddock, although based on this image, we can appreciate they've done justice to the character:
A lot of fans are disappointed in the fact that this film is using motion capture and not, by sticking to traditional animation, staying true to the art of the comic books.
Here I would like to argue that there was once a Tintin cartoon TV show that attempted to stay true to the original books, but didn't succeed. Because of the animation, a lot of the subliminal effects of the original artwork is lost (such as the element of surprise as you move from one still panel to the next), and the only way to retain the impact of still art in film is to create a whole new dimension that can translate through the two mediums.
Based on the trailer, I can see that Spielberg and Jackson have tried to do justice to Hergé's original artwork. Tintin still has that not-really-boy-but-not-yet-man look, as can be seen in this final frame of the trailer:
And here are Thomson and Thompson, as comically identical, and identical to their comic-book counterparts as well, standing behind the thief Silk:
And of course, the setting, with all its vintage cars and Old World charm is heart-wrenchingly authentic.
I am interested to see how Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish stay true to Hergé's style of writing while allowing the language to translate engagingly and realistically to the medium of film.
I read somewhere that Hergé was as much a fan of Spielberg as Spielberg was of him. Hergé has been cited as having said that if anyone could do justice to a Tintin film, it would be Steven Spielberg and no other. Let's hope this faith is realised.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn Countdown: 215 days.
You can watch the trailer here.
I would embed the Youtube video here, but the one thats on there isn't as good as the IMDb one.
The Adventures of Tintin, which releases in the United States on the twenty-third of December, is a motion capture film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Spielberg, Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy.
The film is an adaptation of The Crab with the Golden Claws (which is the book in which Tintin meets Captain Haddock and uncovers a gang of opium smugglers), The Secret of the Unicorn (in which Tintin learns that the Unicorn, a ship captained by one of Captain Haddock's ancestors contained a great deal of treasure and was, as a result, ransacked by the pirate Red Rackham) and Red Rackham's Treasure (in which Tintin and his friends set about on a treasure hunt to uncover the lost cargo of the Unicorn).
In the trailer, we catch a glimps of Thomson and Thompson, the two bumbling detectives, Snowy (who's cooler, Belgian name is Milou) and the villain, Ivan Ivanovtich Sakharine. Unfortunately, we do not see much of Captain Haddock, although based on this image, we can appreciate they've done justice to the character:
A lot of fans are disappointed in the fact that this film is using motion capture and not, by sticking to traditional animation, staying true to the art of the comic books.
Here I would like to argue that there was once a Tintin cartoon TV show that attempted to stay true to the original books, but didn't succeed. Because of the animation, a lot of the subliminal effects of the original artwork is lost (such as the element of surprise as you move from one still panel to the next), and the only way to retain the impact of still art in film is to create a whole new dimension that can translate through the two mediums.
Based on the trailer, I can see that Spielberg and Jackson have tried to do justice to Hergé's original artwork. Tintin still has that not-really-boy-but-not-yet-man look, as can be seen in this final frame of the trailer:
And here are Thomson and Thompson, as comically identical, and identical to their comic-book counterparts as well, standing behind the thief Silk:
And of course, the setting, with all its vintage cars and Old World charm is heart-wrenchingly authentic.
I am interested to see how Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish stay true to Hergé's style of writing while allowing the language to translate engagingly and realistically to the medium of film.
I read somewhere that Hergé was as much a fan of Spielberg as Spielberg was of him. Hergé has been cited as having said that if anyone could do justice to a Tintin film, it would be Steven Spielberg and no other. Let's hope this faith is realised.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn Countdown: 215 days.
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