The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn; USA Release Date December 23

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

LOL. I'm also a long time fan of Tintin and a non-fan Spielberg (You couldn't pay me enough to watch War Horse) and I too enjoyed the film.  I watched the original English version because I love Jamie Bell but I might see it again in French.  Milou is so much better than Snowy.

Many many, many  years ago, this beautiful French boy I had a crush on was chatting amiably with me about Tintin, and I stupidly mentioned Snowy. "His name is Milou! " said my crush, frostily.

Oops!!  



BTW, don't laugh, but--I actually did  go to see War Horse over the holiday weekend, and--wonder of wonders, I didn't hate it!  Of course, it has something to do with the very earnest Mr. Jeremy Irvine, I think....  

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/12/tintin_cartoonist_herg_georges_remi_is_the_subject_of_two_new_biographies_.single.html

Tintin’s Father, Nobody’s Son
The complicated life of Hergé, in two new biographies—one written, one drawn.
By Sam Adams
Posted Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011, at 4:45 PM ET

In Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin,  adapted from the comic books that have enthralled generations, the intrepid boy reporter joins forces with the perpetually soused skipper Captain Haddock to unravel the mystery of Haddock’s birthright. But Tintin himself has no origin. He simply exists, with no ties to past or future generations, a fate that his creator might have wished for himself. The Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, became an international celebrity thanks to the success of Tintin’s collected adventures, which have sold more than 350 million copies worldwide. But he showed little taste for the spotlight, and still less for those who wished to poke into his past.

The Tintin books are models of economy and grace, mixing meticulous detail and stylized tableaux in perfect proportion so that the story is neither generic nor bogged down by excessive rendering. Two newly translated biographies, Benoît Peeters’ traditional Hergé: Son of Tintin  (Johns Hopkins University Press) and the comics biography The Adventures of Hergé (Drawn and Quarterly),  attempt to achieve a similar balance, and together suggest the challenges in telling the story of a man who subsumed himself in his work.

Georges Remi’s back story is as convoluted as any of Tintin’s adventures, if somewhat less romantic. His father, Alexis, was one of twin boys born to a Belgian chambermaid by a man who immediately disappeared. The boys’ upbringing was provided for by their mother’s employer, a countess; their surname came from their mother’s cousin, who signed the marriage certificate as the boys’ father despite the fact that he was only 11 when they were born. Although he dispenses with the prenatal intrigue in a few pages, Benoît Peeters, the author of Hergé: Son of Tintin,  returns again and again to the structuring absence of Hergé’s bloodline, suggesting that his pen name—the phonetic pronunciation of his initials, reversed—was a means of “closing off this false Remi.”

Peeters also makes brief, and strangely distant, mention of a far more troubling aspect of Remi’s childhood: “It seems the that young Georges was the victim of sexual abuse by his mother’s younger brother, his uncle Charles Arthur, nicknamed Tchake, who was ten years his senior.” Apart from a letter written by Remi to a friend in which he makes reference to “the images seared into my mind during my youth and adolescence,” Peeters offers only vague references to childhood trauma as proof, and certainly nothing to support the specificity of the charge. (He also lists, without elaboration, a number of “more or less confirmed pedophiles” among Remi’s close associates.) But it’s undeniable that there’s an arrested quality to the Tintin  books, which Peeters accurately calls “resolutely asexual and antifamilial.”

In reading the Tintin  books—23 completed between 1929 and 1976, plus an unfinished 24th—it’s hard not to be struck by the uniformly masculine universe in which they take place. “For me, women have nothing to do in a world like Tintin’s, which is a world of male friendship,” Remi told an interviewer. In The Secret of the Unicorn,  which forms the basis for a large chunk of Spielberg’s film, a grand total of four lines are allotted to female characters, giving new meaning to the term “boy’s own.” The only woman among the series’ cast of recurring characters is the voluptuous opera singer Bianca Castafiore, a grotesque caricature of feminine excess whose surname translates as “chaste flower.” [And the first name, Bianca, is white!    JG ]

Although Remi eventually gave Tintin’s age as 17, the same as Remi’s when he left school, the character is truly ageless. He’s old enough to hold a job as a journalist, although he does little actual reporting after the first few books, but his interests—treasure, adventure, gadgetry—are uniformly those of a boy, and that went for his creator as well. For all the attention Remi paid to the design of automobiles and the details of place, exquisitely rendered in the clear-line style, his characters are two-dimensional, as simple as the flat planes of color that fill their “clear-line” outlines. It’s not hard to see the appeal of Tintin’s world to Steven Spielberg, a child of divorce forever exploring the aesthetics of adolescence.

Peeters wrestles mightily, and often tediously, with the accusations of racism and right-wing bias that have attached to Remi since the Second World War. Remi began chronicling Tintin’s exploits for the Catholic newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle,  whose editor, a priest named Norbert Wallez, dictated the setting for Tintin’s first two adventures: Tintin in the Land of the Soviets  and Tintin in the Congo.  Although the latter’s colonialist attitudes and thick-lipped caricatures were toned down when Remi and his associates reworked the early black-and-white stories for republication in color [Uhm, no, I still have the French edition of the color version, and the drawings are racially grotesque. JG ], both books are routinely omitted from otherwise complete collections. (In the Land of the Soviets  circulated primarily as samizdat until the 1980s.) The stories’ propagandistic origins are clear—in Soviets,  Tintin observes Russians being forced to vote for the Communist Party at gunpoint—but their agenda is carried out without conviction.

In a scene from The Shooting Star ’s 1941 newspaper run, omitted from the collected version, two bearded, hook-nosed merchants discuss the end of the world as an opportunity to shirk their debts, an anti-Semitic caricature in line with the politics of his wartime outlet, Le Soir,  which actively supported the Nazi occupation of Belgium. Peeters unhelpfully concludes that Remi “was no more racist than the next person”—which next person, exactly?—but the overriding impression is that of a man too naïve, even immature, to consider his own views.

The Adventures of Hergé'  by Jose-Louis Bocquet, Jean-Luc Fromental,
and Stanislas Barthelemy

 
The Adventures of Hergé,  a comic-book biography written by José-Louis Boucquet and Jean-Luc Fromental and illustrated by Stanislas Barthélémy, is episodic by design, compressing Remi’s life into a scant 62 pages. But the progression of discontiguous two-page segments aptly mirrors the style of the Tintin books, whose plots were often devised week by week, with each lower right-hand panel stranding the heroes in some predicament or other. A handful of expository passages notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine following the book’s story without a significant familiarity with Remi’s life. A coy smile between Remi's wife, Germaine, and his editor, Wallez, is confined to a single panel, implying that she might have held her husband's employer in higher regard than Remi himself—a notion Peeters, in his more detailed account, pinpoints as an early sign of their marriage's weaknesses.

Barthélémy wisely evokes Remi’s style without attempting to copy it, but he’s close enough that it’s almost jarring when women work their way into the narrative. These are not the pillowy caricatures of the Tintin books themselves, but sexualized adult women: Hergé’s wife, his mistresses, and the objects of various unrequited affections. The Adventures of Hergé  is by no means a comprehensive portrait, but by telling Remi’s story in an approximation of his style, the book evokes an unspoken fusion between its subject and his work, implying resonances that Peeters struggles to consign to black-and-white type.

Both books attempt to craft a continuous narrative out of the life of a man who resolutely resisted analysis, by himself and by others. As the strain of producing the Tintin  strip, as well as other assorted other projects, took its toll on him, Remi suffered an array of psychosomatic symptoms, including outbreaks of eczema and boils, and was plagued by recurring nightmares of whiteness. (Evidently there was nothing more terrifying than a blank page.) Remi seems to have retained an unhealthy distance from his own life, disappearing into his work until the work itself became the problem. In many respects, it seems as if the most interesting parts of Remi, and certainly those he was most willing to share with the public, went into his art, leaving little for his chroniclers to pick over.

One can almost imagine slipping the pages of The Adventures of Hergé  between the Tintin  albums themselves, filling in blanks and bridging gaps. Somewhere between this episodic but evocative comic-book bio and Tintin’s own adventures lies the story of Georges Remi, hidden in the white expanses that separate one panel from the next.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Charles de Gaulle once declared that in terms of international fame, Tintin was his only rival. We, on the other hand, don’t even know how to say his name right.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/movies/tintin-is-a-new-breed-of-comic-book-hero-for-most-americans.html?pagewanted=all


An Innocent in America
By CHARLES McGRATH
Published: January 2, 2012

Steven Spielberg’s new film “The Adventures of Tintin” took in roughly $12 million during the past holiday weekend. This is not tremendous box office (“Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol,” by contrast, exceeded $30 million), but it’s more than some skeptics had predicted for a movie about a cartoon character who, though beloved in most parts of the world, is practically unknown in the United States. Charles de Gaulle once declared that in terms of international fame, Tintin was his only rival. We, on the other hand, don’t even know how to say his name right. In the original cartoons Tintin, the creation of the Belgian artist Hergé, spoke French, and thus his name should be pronounced “Tanh-tanh,” and not, as the movie has it, to rhyme with “win win.”

Tintin is the antithesis of a superhero, which may account for why he seems so alien to Americans. He has an upswept red forelock, wears plus fours and argyle socks and lives alone with his dog, Snowy. He has no exceptional powers, no sexual identity and seemingly no inner life at all. Hergé began drawing the character in 1929 and was working on a full-length Tintin adventure (it would have been the 24th) when he died in 1983, and in all that time Tintin never aged, remaining a barely pubescent 14 or 15. He ostensibly works as a journalist, though we almost never see him write or file a story. .

The books are long by comic-book standards, with more pages and many more words to a page than usual. They’re genuine graphic novels, to use the current terminology, and require from the reader time and attention and a kind of childlike surrender. If the Spielberg version encourages a new American audience to read and appreciate these sweet, charming and visually arresting books, the way the rest of the world does, that may be its greatest accomplishment.

The new movie is based on three Tintin adventures that Hergé drew during World War II: “The Crab With the Golden Claws” (1941), “The Secret of the Unicorn” (1943) and “Red Rackham’s Treasure” (also 1943). They are a slightly misleading introduction to Hergé’s work, which typically has a more documentary quality and dispatches Tintin to solve mysteries in exotic locales.

In the beginning the Tintin adventures were intended to show the world to Belgian children, and the series never entirely lost that globe-trotting curiosity. Other books are set, for example, in Peru, India, Egypt, China, the United States (where in 1931 Tintin runs into Al Capone) and the Moon.

For all the variety in the stories, though, there is also a formulaic similarity, with the same supporting characters reliably turning up: Captain Haddock, a blustering, alcoholic sea captain; Professor Calculus, an absent-minded, hard-of-hearing scientist; Thompson and Thomson, bumbling, look-alike, bowler-hatted detectives; the beak-nosed, shrill-voiced diva Bianca Castafiore. From volume to volume they make variations on the same jokes, and that too is part of the reassuring appeal of the series.

Mr. Spielberg has said that he first heard about Tintin in 1983, when he learned that French reviewers were comparing his “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to some of Hergé’s work. Curious, he bought a couple of Tintin books in the original French and, though unable to read them, was immediately smitten.

It’s easy to understand why. Not only is there an Indiana Jones-like quality to some of Tintin’s adventures — he’s forever discovering secret passages or getting trapped in a crashing plane — but Hergé’s drawings have an inherently cinematic quality. They look like storyboards or a movie shooting script, with close-ups, telescopic shots, jump cuts and action sequences.

Hergé, who grew up watching silent comedies, clearly loved the movies, and in 1948 even offered to adapt some of his books for Disney. The studio passed, possibly because the stories were more complicated, more grown-up, than the ones it was then making, or maybe because Hergé’s style was so unlike Disney’s. Hergé was a brilliant draftsman, and his drawings, devoid of cuteness and sentimentality, are a compelling mixture of simplicity and precise detail. Tintin’s face, for example, is just a Charlie Brown-like assemblage of dots and squiggles, but cars and airplanes are so carefully rendered that they can be identified by make and model.

Hergé’s drawings are also insistently two-dimensional, with no shadows, very little shading and not many perspective tricks. They are content to lie flat on the page. To adult fans, who have included Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the purity and creativity of the drawing is what most recommends the Tintin series. And to readers used to the original books, the most disconcerting thing about Mr. Spielberg’s film is the way it jumps off the screen.

One British literary critic, stunned by the transformation to film, said he felt he had “witnessed a rape.” The movie was shot using the motion-capture technique, which creates not only a plusher look than in most cartoon movies but also a more rounded one. It brings Tintin, who in Hergé’s conception is practically an abstraction, to a kind of realistic-seeming life in which he looks a little uncomfortable. When he speaks (in the voice of Jamie Bell), it is even more startling, if you’re used to hearing him only as words in your own head.

Hergé once said that Tintin was a projection of his inner self and his own spirit of bravery and adventure, which is true only up to a point. In many respects Hergé, whose real name was Georges Remi, was a good deal less appealing than his creation. In person he was a bland, unsociable man whose politics, in the beginning, anyway, were noxiously right-wing. His drawings for the 1931 adventure “Tintin in the Congo” were so racist that he later redrew them, and he also had to redo a later book, “The Shooting Star,” because it was anti-Semitic. It included a pair of characters named Isaac and Salomon who looked forward to the end of the world because it meant they wouldn’t have to pay their debts.

During the war, when many Belgians refused to cooperate with their Nazi occupiers, Hergé happily went to work for the pro-German paper Le Soir  (the same publication for which, as a young man, the literary critic Paul de Man wrote anti-Semitic articles).

In later years Hergé mellowed a little and, formerly a strict Roman Catholic, even took an interest in Eastern religions, which may be reflected in “Tintin in Tibet” (1960), the most beautiful and heartfelt of the books. But Tintin himself, by never growing up, by never even updating his 1930s-style wardrobe, remained a timeless blank slate on which readers could project their own feelings and imaginings. It’s this innocence and indeterminacy — his unworldliness — that probably makes Tintin feel so alien to American readers, and it’s also what most recommends him.

ALSO:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/12/25/movies/tintin-phases-slideshow.html?ref=movies

The Hair Remains the Same

With his round face, button nose and pointy orange tuft of hair, the character Tintin looks familiar, even to those who may think they haven’t seen him before. Long beloved in Europe, he is making his American big-screen debut in the 3-D animated film “The Adventures of Tintin,” which opened on Wednesday in the United States, two months after its debut overseas.
 
The character sprung from the mind and pen of the Belgian illustrator Hergé in 1928 while he was working at a daily newspaper. Tintin, a boy journalist with an enterprising spirit and a trusty dog named Snowy, became the star of a series of “Adventures of Tintin” comic books that Hergé illustrated until his death in 1983. The character seemed an ideal match for the director Steven Spielberg, who said he saw much of himself in Tintin and sought to adapt his adventures into a feature film.
 
“I became enthralled with the way Hergé told his stories,” Mr. Spielberg said in an interview. “Grand, epic, global adventures about a young reporter who goes all around the world looking for stories to tell and then gets himself deeply involved in the stories he’s telling. I always related to that because I do the same thing.”
 
The new film uses performance-capture technology made by WETA Digital, the effects company that brought the character of Gollum to life in the “Lord of the Rings” films and created photorealistic worlds in James Cameron’s “Avatar.” But Tintin’s visual journey — in images large and small — has been as varied as his journeys in the books. Here’s a look back at some of the various iterations of the character leading up to and including the latest film.


Start the Slideshow:

"Among the appealing elements of the Tintin books are how action and expressions are evoked in each drawing. While characters were designed with clear, simple lines, their actions conveyed a full range of emotion and became a fundamental part of how each book progressed...."


http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/12/25/movies/tintin-phases-slideshow-1.html

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2012/01/beyond_the_unca.php



Beyond the Uncanny Valley
ByKevin Kelly
2 January 2012


I saw the Tintin movie last night, which was super. I think we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the hyperreal.

What's the uncanny valley? As we make robots and animations more human-like, we increase our emotional attachment to them, but only up to a point. As they become nearly human, that very tiny remaining difference of inhumanness can creep us out. That's the theory of the "Uncanny Valley," which supposedly explains why audiences found the animated humans in the movie Polar Express, or the baby in the Pixar's first short movie, so repulsive. They were too human to dismiss, but not human enough to embrace. Computer artists long ago passed the test for 100% realism in artificial beings, such as the Navi in Avatar, or Golum in Lord of the Rings. Now they have passed the test for humans (at least for me) in Tintin.

In the first few minutes of the Tintin  movie, there is a momentary hesitation when you first see the face of the characters; a feeling they are just a bit shy of something. But that moment passes quickly and thereafter the humans (and animals) seem totally real. Their movements, skin texture, hair, expressions, eyes, everything says they are real -- even though they are only simulations. It helps that the environments are also 100% believable, including the elements of water, weather, atmosphere, sand, and city.

In fact, I believe that we have passed beyond the uncanny valley into the plains of hyperreality.

One of the great charms of the Tintin  movie (besides its solid story, and uplifting sensibility) is the incredible degree of detail, texture, lighting, and drama that infuses every scene. Because the whole movie is synthetic, every scene can be composed perfectly, lit perfectly, arranged perfectly, and captured perfectly. There is a painterly perfection that the original Tintin  comics had that this movie captures. This means that the stupendous detail found in say Tintin's room, or in a back alley, or on the ship's deck can be highlighted beyond what it could in reality. You SEE EVERYTHING. When Tintin's motorcycle is chasing the bad guy and begins to fall apart, nothing is obscured. Every realistic mechanical part is illuminated realistically. This technique gives a heightened sense of reality because every corner of the entire scene is heightened realistically, which cannot happen in real life, yet you only see real-looking things. This trick lends the movie a hyperreality. Its artificial world looks realer than real.

Now that we have passed throughout the uncanny valley, and audiences will accept totally synthetic actors, filmmakers will begin to explore the limits of the hyperreal. Yes, we'll have more realistic aliens and alien environments in science fiction films, but we'll also have hyperreal suburbs and hyperreal urban cities with hyper real ordinary people in the present tense. I'm expecting that for the next ten years or so, directors will create more and greater hyperreal films, until we tire of it (like we have with hyperreal high dynamic range still photography). And then we'll see shaky, gritty, unfocused, hand held camcorder type totally synthetic worlds as well. And every variety of in-between hybrid worlds.

In 20 years we will simply stop asking the question of whether this or that part was real.

[Meryl]

In 20 years we will simply stop asking the question of whether this or that part was real.

We may be there now.  Suspension of belief happens pretty automatically if the story and the art are good and don't draw undue attention to themselves.

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

In 20 years we will simply stop asking the question of whether this or that part was real.

We may be there now.  Suspension of belief happens pretty automatically if the story and the art are good and don't draw undue attention to themselves.

David was staring out of the window. "Teddy, you know what I was thinking? How do you tell what are real things from what aren't real things?"
 
The bear shuffled its alternatives. "Real things are good."

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

David started to draw a jumbo jet on the back of his letter. "You and I are real, Teddy, aren't we?"
 
The bear's eyes regarded the boy unflinchingly. "You and I are real, David." It specialized in comfort.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
 
"Teddy - I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?"

Teddy said, "You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what 'real' really means. Let's go indoors."
 
"First I'm going to have another rose!" Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy.
 


http://downlode.org/Etext/supertoys.html


"Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" by Brian Aldiss was the literary basis for the first act of the feature film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was an unrealized film project of Stanley Kubrick, posthumously developed and filmed by Steven Spielberg and released in 2001.

http://bettermost.net/forum/index.php/topic,49626.0.html

[oilgun]

Many many, many  years ago, this beautiful French boy I had a crush on was chatting amiably with me about Tintin, and I stupidly mentioned Snowy. "His name is Milou! " said my crush, frostily.

Oops!!  



BTW, don't laugh, but--I actually did  go to see War Horse over the holiday weekend, and--wonder of wonders, I didn't hate it!  Of course, it has something to do with the very earnest Mr. Jeremy Irvine, I think....  

Yes but I hear he NEVER takes off his shirt! Epic Fail! 

[Aloysius J. Gleek]

Yes but I hear he NEVER takes off his shirt! Epic Fail! 

Well, in War Horse,  he does  expose a single (albeit chaste) nipple!