Steven Spielberg has kept
Tintin mostly a curious mystery up until this week, but after a few posters kicked off the marketing campaign yesterday and got many of us genuinely excited - Columbia Pictures have followed up with
a teaser trailer citing the movie to be 'A Motion Picture Event'. i.e. - after all the secrecy it's getting near the time to sell this baby. Although I'm no advocate of motion captured technology, the way Spielberg seems to have adopted it here includes a nostalgic feel for the Herge comics but also a classier and more refined and polished look to it than the recent work of Robert Zemeckis. Working alongside
Peter Jackson's extraordinary company WETA Digital who won the Oscar for Avatar, the result looks positively breathtaking.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Xwta_XIJo However and this should be important, the trailer mostly sticks to shooting characters from behind and in and around shadows. There aren't too many close-ups and as the super animated technology's biggest criticism over the years has been the dead-eyed and soul-less eyes of the characters, it's just impossible to make any judgements at this early stage when so many of them are kept hidden. We do however get one close-up of Tintin at the very end of the trailer and it did have a few of us scratching our heads to try and work out why that particular, kind of feminine look was chosen. And the newspaper gag of the Thompson Twins is brilliant.
The trailers and the posters remind us of the significant talent behind this one; Spielberg directs, Jackson produces.
Steven Moffat (Dr. Who, Sherlock),
Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) and
Joe Cornish (Attack The Block) wrote the script (and by the way, how cool is it that they get the big credits and not the actors?)
Jamie Bell mo-capped and voices Tintin.
Andy Serkis (Captain Haddock),
Daniel Craig (Red Rackham),
Simon Pegg &
Nick Frost (as The Thompson Twins) round-out the cast. Tintin is due in Europe on October 26th but not until December 23rd in the U.S.