The Adventures of Tintin

[Dr Lee]

I think Tintin looks great...

 

[ALP]

I agree wtih Timstuff. So many people swear this will be better because it as more detail than Zemecki's work. But Zemeckis said the same thing about his own work... "Mars Needs Mom will have much more detail and better lighting than Christmas Carol!" "Christmas Carol will have much more detail and better lighting than Beowulf" "Beowulf will have much more detail and better lighting than Polar Express." And on and on and on...

Basically it's just the studios spending hundreds of million on each film trying to make them more realistic looking and true to life in the eyes than the last while none of them reach the level they want. And I say this as someone who doesn't mind Zemeckis' mo cap work and think some of it is decent, but this film only looks maybe a step up or two from the detail of Mars Needs Moms or Carol. I've heard many people say how incredibly realistic the fat guy in that movie looked. But they could still tell it's animation and that made it a turn off due to Uncanny Valley.

Better lighting and a bit more detail in Tintin but still look quite similar.

 

[Crockett]

But since this is Spielberg's first time trying motion-capture CG and not to mention WETA Digital is behind the animation I'm going to need to see more before making proper judgement.

 

[Timstuff]

Once you reach a certain level of detail and photorealism, then you have to ask the question "why bother doing this as an animated film at all?" Everyone I asked about Mars Needs Moms pretty much agreed that it looks like it had no reason to be an animated film, and the reason why (which I know, since I am an animation student), is because it does not have the energetic and expressive timing that an animated film does. They combined the dullness of real-life motion with the fakeness of CG, essentially presenting audiences with the worst of what both mediums have to offer in a package that leaves no-one interested.

Good animation comes from having good keyframes, whether it's 2D, 3D, or stop motion photography. There are no keyframes with motion capture, which is why motion capture movies always end up looking so dull and lifeless. Spielberg is following in Zemeckis's footsteps right into uncanny valley, and no amount of money or technology will be able to compensate the fact that Spielberg is ignoring the fundamentals about how to make a good animated movie.

 

[dark_b]

but Mars Need Moms didnt have stylized looking humasn. TinTin has.

 

[Timstuff]

but Mars Need Moms didnt have stylized looking humasn. TinTin has.

That doesn't matter-- in fact, it could make the end results even more disappointing. If you have stylized characters, you need equally stylized movement, and you're not going to get that from motion capture. As I said before, everyone defends this film using all of the stuff that doesn't matter, while not addressing the core problem-- the animation itself. All of the other stuff like lighting, models, character designs, etc. does not matter if you do not get the fundamentals right.

 

[Electrofarce]

That doesn't matter-- in fact, it could make the end results even more disappointing. If you have stylized characters, you need equally stylized movement, and you're not going to get that from motion capture. As I said before, everyone defends this film using all of the stuff that doesn't matter, while not addressing the core problem-- the animation itself. All of the other stuff like lighting, models, character designs, etc. does not matter if you do not get the fundamentals right.

I actually think the animation was quite good. I don't really see a spot in the trailer where it needs much work. The movement looks like reality, the textures and lighting work, and the characters are stylized just like Hodge's had imagined them. I honestly have no major complaints.

And this is completely different technology than anything Zemeckis has made. It's the tech used for Avatar. Zemeckis' method has always been straight forward motion capture, and never really spent time animating the final product. What the animators at WETA did for both this film and Avatar, is they captured the motion with stereoscopic 3D cameras, and then actual animators did most of the work, making sure everything looked perfect.

And you keep saying "Speilberg" this & "Speilberg" that, but really it is WETA you should be addressing. Zemeckis used his own homemade form of primitive motion capture, and that's why his films look like utter s**t. Don't forget that WETA has an amazing and almost flawless track record, with both visual effects and animation.

 

[Doctor Jones]

Herge's style is pretty distinct. If they went live action, they would have done away with that style to fit into this world, and it wouldn't have felt like it probably. Had they gone live action and incorporated his style, it wouldn't have worked. And fans would have complained.

Hand drawn animation is an option, but we are getting less of those. I think it's pretty great they chose to approach it this way for something like this instead of hand drawn.

 

[TheVileOne]

Christmas Carol had stylized looking humans too.

As for the whole Spielberg and Jackson thing getting asses in the seats . . . didn't work for Lovely Bones, Munich, and Terminal . And Terminal was HANKS and SPIELBERG. And Hanks is one of the biggest BO draws in the world typically.

The animation doesn't look that stylized to me. It looks like they are almost trying to render Tintin as a "real" human. Giving him lots of human characteristics and features.

Just saying. Final Fantasy flopped. Beowulf, Christmas Carol were underperformers and disappointments. Mars Needs Moms flopped. I don't see much of a difference here.

Sure WETA is cool and they've done great work before, but even good FX houses have worked on bad movies before.

 

[Sawyer]

The Terminal's budget was 60 million and it made 219 worldwide.

 

[DarthSkywalker]

I actually think the animation was quite good. I don't really see a spot in the trailer where it needs much work. The movement looks like reality, the textures and lighting work, and the characters are stylized just like Hodge's had imagined them. I honestly have no major complaints.

And this is completely different technology than anything Zemeckis has made. It's the tech used for Avatar. Zemeckis' method has always been straight forward motion capture, and never really spent time animating the final product. What the animators at WETA did for both this film and Avatar, is they captured the motion with stereoscopic 3D cameras, and then actual animators did most of the work, making sure everything looked perfect.

And you keep saying "Speilberg" this & "Speilberg" that, but really it is WETA you should be addressing. Zemeckis used his own homemade form of primitive motion capture, and that's why his films look like utter s**t. Don't forget that WETA has an amazing and almost flawless track record, with both visual effects and animation.

Who cares about "realistic" movement in an animated film? It is all about the character of the animation. I don't love Wall-E because he is "realistic". I love him because how he moves is so damn adorable.

 

[TheVileOne]

The Terminal's budget was 60 million and it made 219 worldwide.

Which for Spielberg and Hanks is damn disappointing, much like I predict Tintin will be .

 

[Timstuff]

Herge's style is pretty distinct. If they went live action, they would have done away with that style to fit into this world, and it wouldn't have felt like it probably. Had they gone live action and incorporated his style, it wouldn't have worked. And fans would have complained.

Hand drawn animation is an option, but we are getting less of those. I think it's pretty great they chose to approach it this way for something like this instead of hand drawn.

IMO it's being wasted. They could have done a striaght CG film and I would have been excited, but that is not what Spielberg does. Every time he's been involved with animation previously it's been as a producer, not a director, and he's going to take his live action aesthetics and shoe-horn them into an animated world the same way Zemeckis has been doing. Spielberg isn't an animator, and his directorial style is all based around whittling down the performances of on-stage actors to get what he wants. Good animation is carefully planned and is based around key poses, no matter what kind of animation it is. This is just going play out like a live action film with a fancy coat of CG paint, which means it's going to be dull.

If Spielberg was really hellbent on directing this movie himself, he should have used live action, since that is what he is good at. If he was hellbent on using animation to keep with the books' style, he should have only produced it and let a real animator (or animators) direct it. By going to mocap route this movie is just a big wad of wasted potential. It doesn't matter if he is using better motion capture than Robert Zemeckis, because as I have state a million times, better technology is not going to fix the fact that Spielberg is walking into the same hole as Zemeckis. It will certainly look better than Zemeckis's movies, but that doesn't mean it will be good enough, because motion capture movies will never be as good as real animated movies no matter how good the technology gets.

 

[mclay18]

His character is the only one where you can't really get too crazy with it. He's a mid 20s ginger with a weird cowlick in the front of his head. If they made him look any more stylized it might not work.

Yeah. Everyone else from what I could see looks spot-on. Tintin's face just looks... off. But it's just one scene, everything else could look great.

 

[JAK®]

The defenders of this film always use the detail of the characters, lighting, etc. to justify why this is supposed to somehow be an improvement over A Christmas Carol, but never the animation itself. Hmm, I wonder why that is? Could it be because from what little we saw in the trailer, the animation already looks like it's going to be just as stiff and awkward as the stuff in Zemeckis's movies?

Except it doesn't. I was very impressed with the actual animation. It's the faces that have yet to convince me. But we haven't really seen them.

 

[Darkness Falls]

watched the secret of the unicorn cartoon today
really looking forward to this movie now

 

[Dark Raven]

I still would've preferred a live action version of Tintin to animation. It's the same reason why we all like live action versions of movies with real actors (such as the Avengers) instead of seeing an animated film.

Where is the Calculus character in all of this? He doesn't seem to appear at all in the cast list, yet part of this movie is based on "Red Rackham's Treasure". Calculus invented the iconic shark submarine which they used to go treasure hunting. He is also a huge part of the Tintin mythos, even though his character can be quite annoying since he's hard of hearing. Couldn't he have at least had a small role?

 

[Sgt.Pepper]

I still would've preferred a live action version of Tintin to animation. It's the same reason why we all like live action versions of movies with real actors (such as the Avengers) instead of seeing an animated film.

Where is the Calculus character in all of this? He doesn't seem to appear at all in the cast list, yet part of this movie is based on "Red Rackham's Treasure". Calculus invented the iconic shark submarine which they used to go treasure hunting. He is also a huge part of the Tintin mythos, even though his character can be quite annoying since he's hard of hearing. Couldn't he have at least had a small role?

I would prefer a traditional animated film on Tintin instead of a live-action one. It's kind of hard to cast actors that look like the characters and you can't maintain the stylized, caricatured faces like Hergé's art.

It's actually not known so far if Professor Calculus will be in the film or not, but it doesn't look like he will be in the film to me. But since Anthony Horowitz is writing the sequel which will be based on Prisoners of the Sun and since the character features in that comic, maybe they could introduce Professor Calculus in that instead.

 

[Crockett]

I really do wish that Professor Calculus is in the movie but it's fine by me since they're adding a few new characters in the movie as well as weaving the 9th, 11th and supposedly 12th adventures together so it will have enough new stuff for the movie and different compared to the comics, which I don't mind with.

 

[Dark Raven]

I'm guessing the only part of "Crab with the Golden Claws" they'll use is the first meeting between Tintin and Captain Haddock, which means no opium plot. I think most of it will be based around Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackhams Treasure.

Crab is still a bit like early Tintin anyway, which isn't as interesting as the later books with Haddock.

 

[Sgt.Pepper]

I think that the Opium plot could possibly be in the film. I mean, Omar Ben Salaad is in the film.

 

[Dark Raven]

Is the first mate Allan in it? He was in Crab and tried to usurp Haddock as Captain. Not sure how he could fit in with the rest of the Unicorn/ Rackham plot, but I suppose he could be after the treasure as well.

It seems Tintin's arch enemy (and Allan's subsequent boss) Rastapopolous isn't in this movie, even though he wasn't in either Crab, Unicorn or Rackham. It would be nice if he had a cameo though to set him up as a future villain.

 

[Sgt.Pepper]

Yeah, Allan is in the film; and it looks like he's working together with Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (the collector of model ships) even though they never meet each other in the comics.

 

[dark_b]

is that Craig on the right?

 

[Sgt.Pepper]

You mean Daniel Craig right? He's not one of those characters. Red Rackham (Daniel Craig) never met Tintin or Captain Haddock though he did meet Haddock's ancestor. Craig's character only appear in the 17th-century.