67 Comments »   posted in Disney, Feature Film, Pixar, aardman, Brave, dreamworks, Frankenweenie, Hotel Transylvania, Ice age: Continental Drift, Le Magasin des Suicides, Madagascar 3, Okami kodomo no ame to yuki, Paranorman, Ribbit, Rise of the Guardians, Secret World of Arriety, The Lorax, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Wreck-it Ralph

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This is not a review of the Adventures of Tintin. I think we can all agree there have been enough of those already. My primary interest in checking out Tintin was to see the animation approach taken by Steven Spielberg and New Zealand animation studio Weta (as well as Giant Studios, which handled the motion capture recording). These two studios are at the cutting edge of exploring new forms of character animation, and Tintin has proven to be an important stepping stone in the development of our art form. To my eyes, it’s the first successful example of “photoreal cartooning.” By successful, I don’t mean perfect, but rather that the technology no longer disrupts the overall viewing experience. It takes a generous imagination to see where the technologies in Tintin are headed, but think back to the creepy baby in John Lasseter’s Tin Toy. It took less than twenty years for CG character animation to evolve from a deformed lopsided infant into the most common feature animation filmmaking technique.

To be honest, it’s hard for me to judge the animation in Tintin. Photorealistic cartooning—which some will argue is an oxymoron—makes even keyframed CG animation look traditional. Many will say it isn’t even animation. The confusion is understandable. Animation is evolving so rapidly before our eyes that we can barely keep pace with these changes. We desperately try to apply old labels and definitions and find them insufficient. Still, Tintin at its core is pure animation created frame by frame. True, it was augmented by other processes, but the end result was achieved distinctly through frame-by-frame techniques. And if the mark of a true piece of animation art is the director’s control over every element within the frame, then never has this been truer than in Tintin.

Motion capture is a flexible technique that can be stretched in multiple directions. James Cameron used it in Avatar to mimic the performance of live actors. Ironically, Cameron had to employ a team of animators to tweak and mold the motion capture data to achieve greater realism. The technology cannot yet accurately record the nuances of human behavior without the intervention of animators.

Spielberg, on the other hand, appears to have made animators a more integral part of the creative process. Instead of demanding that the animators make the motion capture data look more realistic, he allowed them a degree of freedom. In this LA Times interview, he explained, “I can underwrite or overwrite a performance and through the animators put [something into a performance] that even the actors didn’t bring to the bay.” In that quote, Spielberg acknowledges that the actor is not the be-all, end-all of the motion capture process (much to Andy Serkis’s dismay I’m sure) and that animators play a role in creating the performance, much as in traditional animation.

Spielberg’s attempt to marry motion capture and animation is a step forward, but not entirely successful. The photorealism of the design jars with the disturbingly wacky behavior of the characters. Watching a pliable, squash-and-stretch cartoon character like Daffy Duck wrapped up in a spinning plane propeller and spit out is funny; watching the photoreal Captain Haddock perform that same gag in Tintin looked awkward and uncomfortable. This discordance between design and performance will be ironed out when the technology is placed in the hands of experienced animation directors who more fully understand how the medium works.

There’s another component to Tintin that’s been largely overlooked and it’s this:

Producer Peter Jackson explained what Spielberg is doing in the photo:

For [Tintin] we wanted to create a virtual studio – we haven’t even got a name for it – where Steven would be able to pick up a virtual camera that looks a little like a PlayStation controller with a six-inch screen and use it to step inside the world of Tintin that we had created. All the locations had to be built in advance of us doing the motion-capture shoot, as it were; so for the best part of two or three years we were building all of the sets, all of the cars, all the airplanes, everything in the film was constructed but then the key thing was to break away from all of the technical restraints and make it as much a live-action experience as we could.

This is a transformative concept, much like 3-D was hyped as being, except this is the real deal. Whereas animation in the past was a labor-intensive process, and each scene was carefully laid out from a single angle that was drawn by the layout artist. Even as we moved to computer-generated imagery, artists were careful not to overreach the boundaries of their world. Brad Bird told me how he stayed on budget on The Incredibles by carefully selecting shots in the storyboard/animatic stage and not modeling the world beyond the confines of those preselected shots.

To open up the entire world to the animation filmmaker creates a tantalizing array of possibilities. It is a paradigm shift in animation production that pushes it closer to the world of the live-action camera, while still remaining firmly entrenched in the realm of cartoon fantasy. The technology also raises interesting questions. For example, if a director is selecting all his shots via a specialized hand-held controller, what could that potentially do to the role of the previz/layout artist? These roles won’t disappear anytime soon, but the job descriptions must undergo an evolution. The “virtual studio” approach will mean more planning upfront and more work for people who have to design and build the worlds, but less control over the finished film for the layout artists.

The limitations of the filmmaking-by-controller approach are evident in Tintin. Spielberg is trapped in a videogame of his own making and can’t stop exploring the world long enough to tell a story. Knowing when to exercise restraint will become even more crucial in this new mode of animation production. Whenever I see the incessant camera moves in animated films today, I’m reminded me of something that French animation director Michel Ocelot told me over dinner a couple years ago. Michel abhors camera pans and trucks. He feels that camera movements pull the viewer out of the story, and he prefers a static screen as much as possible. His austere minimalism may seem archaic, but the argument for Ocelot’s point of view would be the pirate ship battle and the crane-fight finale in Tintin. Despite their nauseating overuse of the camera, both of those scenes lumbered along, failing to elicit any tingle of excitement or adventure. The camera, even in this latest and fanciest iteration, does not compensate for skillful filmmaking.

Many people, including those with whom I saw Tintin, have commented that they have been exhausted after watching the film. Much of that we could presume is due to the repetitive action sequences, but I would also suggest that it was the overwhelming level of graphic detail. There was so much happening that the eye never stopped racing around the screen, in desperate search of a focal point.

Here’s a good example: halfway down this web page, there’s a short scene with Snowy running. Pay attention at the :27 second mark. There’s a guy running across the street for no apparent reason. He may be running because of the oncoming cars, but then why does he look in the opposite direction of where the cars are coming from? To me, it’s emblematic of the entire production: too many artists working on too many individual elements in each scene. There is an inordinate amount of randomness in Tintin and many scenes lacked cohesion or clarity. Audiences may not have been able to pinpoint the randomness but they certainly felt it.

Tintin was, in some ways, exactly what I expected it to be: a typical Spielberg film with hamfisted direction. But it was also surprising and fascinating from a technological point of view. As the animator’s toolset continues to evolve, directors will gain granular control over cartoons in a way that was never possible before. The challenge in the future, as in the past, will be harnessing the technology to work with the artwork instead of against it.

59 Comments »   posted in Feature Film, Ideas/Commentary, Adventures of Tintin, Brad Bird, Michel Ocelot, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg

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Every Tintin Adaptation—And How Spielberg Stacks Up

December 23, 2011 12:19 pm

Steven Spielberg’s new Adventures of Tintin is the most technically ambitious film version of Tintin to date, but it is hardly the first time Hergé’s boy reporter has been brought to life. To help place Spielberg’s efforts into context, we turned to someone far more qualified than us, French writer and artist David Calvo. In this exclusive piece for Cartoon Brew, he takes a look at the highs and lows of prior Tintin screen adaptations and helps us understand where Spielberg’s performance capture film fits into the picture. When he’s not being a Tintinologist, Calvo is a creative consultant and writer at Ankama, where he has played a key role in developing the popular MMORPG Wakfu. He has also written numerous novels, comic books and short stories, and draws the on-line comic Song of Beulah.

The History of Tintin Adaptations: From Misonne to Spielberg
by David Calvo

It’s been a long time coming. We can read everywhere how Steven Spielberg and Hergé missed their rendez-vous, at the dawn of the 1980s, a few weeks before the Belgian comic master passed away. We’re now resigned to the American side having the upper hand. Today, we can feel Spielberg and Peter Jackson oozing in every frame of the new Tintin, childhood memories and artist’s pride perspiring behind the dual banter of the Thomson and Thomson. The star filmmaking duo have managed to bring this hot, harshly defended property to a new media. Without delving into the technical aspects of this production, adapting Hergé’s master comic book is already a daunting task. It has been done before—sometimes for the best, mostly, for the worst.

“The Crab with the Golden Claws”

The crowning jewel of all Tintin adaptations is the “The Crab with the Golden Claws” handkerchief puppet extravaganza by Hergé’s friend Claude Misonne and her husband João B. Michiels. Splendid and boring, so abstracted, this stop motion tour de force managed to be a scrupulous, if non-inventive, duplication of the comic, filled with wonderful voice performances, horrendous stock shots, and plagued by severe budget problems. The movie was shown only once in theaters, in December, 1947, in front of two thousand kids. The film was seized next morning by the justice, because the adaptation fees wee never paid. The movie has now achieved cult status as the first Belgian animated feature, a visionary precursor in stop motion history.

“Tintin et le Mystère de la Toison d’or”

Often cited as the worst thing you can do to Hergé, the two live-action movies of the Sixties, “Tintin et le Mystère de la Toison d’or” (“Tintin and the Golden Fleece”, Jean-Jacques Vierne, 1961) et “Tintin et les Oranges bleues” (“Tintin and the Blue Oranges”, Philippe Condroyer, 1964), deserve to have their reputations rehabilitated today. If “la Toison d’Or” fares better than the “Oranges Bleues,” it’s because of the exoticism, the touristic adventures, and the multiple references to the Tintin canon. Despite their cruel lack of any cinematic values and terrible scripts (both are original stories by André Barret), these playful, lush productions were able to pull the major feat of having perfect main characters: a Tintin superbly played twice by Jean Pierre Talbot, and two Haddock incarnations, Georges Wilson and Jean Bouise—both major French actors bringing uncanny depth to this difficult character.

Belvision’s Tintin series

The Sixties were the apotheosis of the Franco-Belgian comic-book school, and Belgian studios Belvision, founded by Le journal de Tintin editor Raymond Leblanc, had a winning streak of flair. First they adapted Tintin as a cartoon TV show. Produced by Ray Goossens, the seven serials were aired between 1959 and 1964 as five-minute shorts, for a total of 50 episodes (only “The Calculus Affair” was bundled as a feature film). Despite having brought the best animators in Europe to Brussels, the old-fashioned animation and funny characterization perks struggled to overcome the horrid scripts and schematic action. To fit the format, the albums were condensed and chopped, often badly, but the overall thrust of non-stop action and cliffhangers, typical of any serialized mystery, worked perfectly on TV. Curiously, Belvision also produced a stunning fifteen-minute industrial film, “Tintin et la SGM” (1970), to promote a Belgian mining company. (Watch a clip from the industrial film.)

The animated feature “Tintin and the Temple of the Sun”

Next, Belvision seized the big screen with two animated features, which are still a Christmas fixture in France. “Le Temple du Soleil” (“Tintin and the Temple of the Sun,” 1969) was a deeply faithful adaptation of the source material (with thoughtful alteration by comic book artist and journal de Tintin editor Greg). A more technically challenging endeavor, enhanced by a splendid soundtrack featuring a song written by Jacques Brel, the musical alter ego of Hergé. Even if the movie only focused on the second part of the two-album story arc (which will be “adapted” next by Peter Jackson), it retains a large part of the adventurous setting and rhythm. The next feature, “Tintin et le lac aux requins” (Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, 1972) is a funny, original Tintin story pitched by Greg, featured an awesome visit to Syldavia and touching characters, though lacking animation brio and depth.

Opening titles for The Adventures of Tintin

In 1992, The Adventures of Tintin, a new animated TV series aired on FR3, co-produced by France Ellipse studios and Canadian outfit Nelvana (directed by Stephen Bernasconi, assisted by Tintinologist Philippe Goddin). It had a huge success in primetime. The sheer scope forces the admiration: all Hergé’s albums are converted, except for the most controversial (“Tintin in the Congo” and “Tintin in the Land of the Soviets,” while “Tintin in America” was heavily tweaked to erase the Native American problems). Eighteen 45-minutes episodes, and three 24-minute ones, achingly faithful and masterfully executed, were produced. Maybe too faithful. Clean and respectful, lacking any hint of craziness, this adaptation got rid of most of Tintin’s quirky element—guns, politics, alcohol—to provide neutered family entertainment devoid of any risk. One of the key aspects of Hergé’s work was his perfect balance between reality and fantasy. The episodes have been syndicated many times since, cut up and chopped in every possible combination to re-create a serialized experience.

At the dawn of the 21st century, Tintin is back for the masses. Belches and zoophilic jokes aside, it is a clever twist thrusting a quaint, old-school narrative into the future. The movie texture is stunning, everything reflects the overwhelming obsession of Spielberg, including reflection itself, and the fabric gives a sense of depth and place achingly relevant in achieving that “ligne claire” dryness to every overexposed shape. The details are inspiring: the tiny, drunkards eyes of Haddock, his cartoon nose, Tintin’s hands (beautiful), the Thomson’s moustaches and greasy skin. The somewhat jumble of the script, blending two majors storyline with details from all over the oeuvre, manages to remain faithful and utterly sacrilegious at the same time. The whole movie lacks the whimsical, restrained tempo of Hergé, that, despite their short-comings, the previous adaptations managed to pull out.

This over-emphasis on heavy action set pieces, with barely a pause for the characters to breathe, is deeply troubling. Are world mass audiences hungry for more action, more technical bravado, trampling the subtle inheritance of of the most idiosyncratic saga of our time? The shiny, invisible center of Hergé’s mind is still missing from all these adaptations. The endearing success of Tintin is not one of motion, nor emotion. It is tied to the page, to the frame. Subject and Form linked in a perfect, beautiful harmony that cannot translate, giving birth to a singular expression of a universal time frame, frozen forever in a quaint space between conservatism and rebellion. We will have to wait again—this time for Peter Jackson bravado—to see if the Hollywoodization of Tintin’s quirky sensibility can exist in another space.

54 Comments »   posted in Comics, Feature Film, Ideas/Commentary, David Calvo, Hergé, Steven Spielberg, Tintin

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Jennifer Yuh Nelson and Angelina Jolie In Conversation

December 14, 2011 5:04 am

The Hollywood Reporter offers a joint interview between Kung Fu Panda 2 director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, and the voice of Tigress, Angelina Jolie, who also recently directed her first feature film. While the interview doesn’t offer any earth-shattering insights, it’s a rare treat to see animation and live-action directors interacting as equals.

16 Comments »   posted in Animators, Feature Film, Angelina Jolie, DreamWorks Animation, Jennifer Yuh Nelson, Kung Fu Panda 2

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“ParaNorman” trailer #2

December 12, 2011 9:30 am

A second trailer for Laika’s ParaNorman has been leaked to our pals at Bloody-Disgusting.com. Combined with the first teaser it gives us a sharper idea of what’s in store. Focus Features (the art house division of Universal pictures) will release the 3D stop-mo film on August 17th, 2012.

28 Comments »   posted in Feature Film, Stop Motion, Paranorman

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“Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” trailer

December 9, 2011 8:45 am

2012 is shaping up to be a great year for animated features. Even the sequels-to-sequels look great. Case in point: Madagascar 3:

36 Comments »   posted in Feature Film, DreamWorks Animation, Madagascar 3

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“The Lorax” trailer #2

December 8, 2011 2:00 am

A newer, longer look at Illumination’s upcoming The Lorax.

53 Comments »   posted in Feature Film, The Lorax

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