Call him 'Young Indiana Jones'

Extraordinary adventures. Life and death challenges. A battle of wits. These are the elements that comprise some great stories. Some great films too, like the Indiana Jones series.

Those movies came from the tradition of serial movies in the 1930s and ’40s, the kinds of short adventures that follow a main character through one escapade after another, and they always ended with a cliffhanger (so named because of the frequency of someone hanging off of a cliff) to entice the audience back the next week for the following chapter.

In my imagination, Hergé was one of the kids in the front row, although he would likely have been in his twenties at the time. The Boy Scout enthusiast decided to create his own series of stories about a young journalist who becomes embroiled in some pretty fantastic escapades involving merciless and nefarious individuals. Like any good Scout, his protagonist uses his wits and keen detective skills to get him out of trouble and to get him on the right path.

Steven Spielberg, also a Boy Scout in his youth, had the same affinity. So it was probably inevitable that the sensationalist director of the Indiana Jones series would have to put the fabulous Tintin comic books onto celluloid.

Or in this case … CG frames. Spielberg, not one to shy away from new advances in technology, seems to have taken his sweet time in taking advantage of motion capture technology and 3D rendering. After all, it has been seven years since Robert Zemeckis brought us The Polar Express, although I fear that the computer programs have only progressed slightly since then.

In this movie, based on three of HergĂ©’s stories (The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn, and Red Rackham's Treasure), our young protagonist (voiced by Jamie Bell) acquires a beautiful model of an actual ship called the Unicorn in a street market. The decoration, it turns out, conceals one of three clues to the location of a lost treasure.

A ruthless individual named Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (Daniel Craig) already has one, and needs the other two to complete the set. The problem is that only a true Haddock can understand the clues. That makes it imperative to have Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) along for the ride, since he is the descendant of Sir Francis Haddock, the captain of the long lost seafaring vessel, the Unicorn. That ship was fabled to have a lot of treasure on board when it disappeared.

And so Tintin haphazardly finds himself in the middle of a good old-fashioned treasure hunt. The story is a classic of the genre, complete with nefarious individuals, evil henchmen, a trained bird, hidden rooms, a pickpocket, pirates, motorcycles, daring feats, swords and machine guns, kidnappers, dim-witted and incompetent policemen, and one intrepid boy explorer. Tintin might look like he’s 12 but he carries himself with a maturity beyond his years as he undertakes treacherous journeys fraught with peril by land, sea and air, participating in life and death struggles every step of the way.

I couldn’t imagine this movie as a live action feature and a standard cartoon, while paying homage to the traditional cartoon comic book character, might not have translated very well to the big screen. That argument can go on forever but the fact is that Tintin – in all its 3D CG glory – works. It’s fun and fast-paced, hits all the right marks and reminds me of what it must have been like to sit in the front row of those grand old serials, even though they came far before my time.

The only complaint that I could have is that motion capture still has a long way to go before facial expressions come off as completely realistic. That is the point, isn’t it? To make a cartoon movie without animators where all of the characters look like actual people. Just like Beowulf did a few years ago, I just end up wishing there were more rotoscoped movies like The Lord of the Rings (and I mean Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 version). Even movies like A Scanner Darkly (that used a computer program called Rotoshop) have something that motion capture doesn’t, and might never have: the illusion that humans have become animated. Tintin just looks like a cartoon trying his hardest to be human.