Antonello Blueberry
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http://www.comingsoon.net/news/movienews.php?id=20387
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, reports Variety. The films will be produced in full digital 3-D using performance capture technology.
The two filmmakers will each direct at least one of the movies; the 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.
Tintin has long been a passion project for Spielberg, who has been trying to get film rights to the comedic and adventurous book series for more than 25 years, a goal realized over the past year. With the rights in place, Spielberg, Jackson and DreamWorks began quietly developing the project.
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 Hergé.
"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," 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 Hergé created," Spielberg continued.
Spielberg and Jackson have selected three stories from Remi's "The Adventures of Tintin" series, which encompassed 23 books published between 1929 and 1976. The series still attracts 2 million new fans a year.
Series, which has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide, chronicles adventures of a junior reporter who will follows stories to the ends of the earth, even though he often finds his own life in jeopardy. His able assistants include a white dog named Snowy, the lunatic Captain Haddock, the muddled genius Professor Calculus and the Thompson Twins.
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 Hergé people!"
