Gollum to play Haddock in Tintin

Andy Serkis, who brought Tolkien's Gollum to life in the Lord of the Rings movies, has hooked back up with Peter Jackson to play Captain Haddock in a forthcoming adaptation of Tintin, the Hollywood Reporter has announced. DreamWorks' Tintin project is a three part series. Steven Spielberg and Jackson will each take the helm …

[graeme leggett]

More remakes?

Blistering barnacles -when will it end?

Puts on Naval jacket over a chunky knit sweater - it is cold out.

[Anonymous Coward]

FFS,

find an original story, Hollywood.

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing to the Euro

I guess this is a sign of the weakening Dollar.

No one in the US has even heard of Tintin. I grew up with him. I'm actually sort of looking forward to this, but I don't expect it to do well in the US. I wonder if they will keep the retro world (the series started in the 1920s, and ended in the sixties).

I'd prefer Asterix, with Peter Jackson playing Obelix.

The hat with the horns, please...

[Andrew Moore]

Is it me?

Am I the only one excited to see that Steven Moffat is doing the adaptation?

[supermeerkat]

@Andrew Moore

Yeah, I'm pleased to see Moffat writing this: he's written some of the best episodes of the new series of Doctor Who.

However, I'm not sure about Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock - I imagine a bigger, burlier man like Brian Blessed or whathisname who played Gimlin in Lord of the Rings.

[Anonymous Coward]

Casting and character

I personally would like to see Snowy replaced with Gollum, my precious...

[Torben Mogensen]

Asterix + Motion capture

The Anonymous Coward may not be aware of this, but two "live action" Asterix movies have been made starring Gerard Depardieu as Obelix. I find these movies to be more silly and less satirical/tongue in cheek than the comic books, though.

Using motion capture (presumably like in Beowulf) for Tintin seems like a strange decision, as there aren't that many supernatural creatures or events in the books -- certainly no more than you can make with tradition special effects.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dan bloody Dare

I will give Peter Jackson a big wet kiss on the lips if he abandons this nonsense and does Dan Dare instead. Ignore Tin Tin, do Dan Dare. Frank Hampson-style retro-1950s CGI. I urge this to be so. It will be a huge flop, but the world will again be at peace.

"I imagine a bigger, burlier man like Brian Blessed or whathisname who played Gimlin in Lord of the Rings."

But then again, he will be computer-generated. A dyed, pumped-up version of Richard Harris would have been good, but alas Richard Harris has given up the ghost. Oliver Reed? I wonder if Herge based the character on (presumably) an actor from the 1920s?

I wonder which adventures they will pick. I don't think any of the old stories were three-parters - the trip to the moon was a two-parter, although that might be too off-beat to start the series. Presumably it won't be "in the land of the soviets". I imagine it will involve pirates, or that shark submarine. Probably not the trippy one in the himalayas.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Gerard Depardieu as Obelix

Huh. That's like having Lawrence Olivier playing BooBoo in The Yogi Bear Movie.

No, I didn't know about that. I guess it never made it over the Big Pond. I'll have to do a bit of searching...

Yeah, I have no idea why they would waste the time and money for the motion capture. Maybe that's how they plan to keep the retro, and keep the hair tuft standing.

I do know that there was at least one French movie made a long time ago, based on Tintin. I remember seeing the pictures, and saying "That's not Tintin!"

[James Anderson]

Missing the point

One ot the joys of the commic books was Herges "lingne clair" graphics - extemely simple shapes, no shadows, block colours but with stong composition.

This has much more in common with low budget Japanese Anime than the usual Peter Jackson megabucks special effects.

I just dont see how he will be able to justify a 5000 server farm to manage the Snowy's pixels. He could just about justify a dual core for the Thompson twins though.

Wouldnt the money be better spent adding some Artificial Intellegence to Paris Hilton?

[Christos Georgiou]

Re: Asterix + Motion capture

The first Astérix movie, as I perceived the movies, wasn't much to the spirit of the comic book; nice images of the village, fun, but that's it. The second one was closer to the spirit (mixing today's issues in the story, e.g. bad GSM phone reception, references to other movies or cultural items, puns etc). But that's just me.

[Simon Greenwood]

Live action Tintin doesn't work

It's been tried in fragments before, such as in the documentary 'Tintin and Me' and it never quite works, because there is just enough cartoonishness in the character to make a real life film look unconvincing. I read the books as a kid in the 1970s and wasted summer mornings watching the 60s cartoon series and can't see it in any other way. The characters aren't solid enough: Tintin himself is a blank canvas on which the action is imposed, so to make him three dimensional and to give him the inevitable Hollywood back story would be to destroy his essential non-existence. The closest comparison would be the 1990 Dick Tracy movie: it signified its cartoon origin through the use of primary colours. If it was to be made again (and it probably will be), it would use motion capture to make the actors more cartoon-like while remaining human. And anyway, how else would you get a good Snowy, who, while he doesn't speak, mimes volumes?

[Torben Mogensen]

Snowy (or Milou/Terry/whatever)

The Asterix movies used a real dog (and a bit of CSI) for Dogmatix/Idefix/whatever and that worked reasonably well. You didn't get the very articulate ear postures, but it worked O.K.

As for Tintin being a blank canvas, that should be no problem for Hollywood: They have lots of actors who look completely anonymous and lack personality. :-)

[GrahamT]

Asterix

The big problem with the Asterix films was the subtitling/translation. Anyone who has read the books in English and French can have nothing but respect for the translators: every joke and nuance caught and some added that weren't in the original. Dogmatix is a so much better pun than Idefix for Obelix's dog - but means almost the same thing - and Cacophonix in place of Assurancetourix for the bard - genius. I understand that all/most of the books were translated by the same two (English) people.

In contrast, the film subtitles missed about 50% of the jokes. The American translators apparently had little knowledge of French culture and idiom.By changing Numerobis' (Numeris = ISDN) name to Edifis, they lost the whole sense of the phone running joke.

P.S.

Why was Tin Tin's dog, called Bobby in the original Flemish, translated to Snowey? What's wrong with Bobby?

[Laurence Penney]

Live action won't work? See the play!

Simon Greenwood, in denying that live action could ever quite work, you sound like you haven't seen the stage play. Inexcusable for any kind of Tintin fan!

It started at the Barbican last year, has just done a short tour and is now in the West End. I saw it in Cardiff. It is amazing, truly unmissable. Please go and see it.

http://www.tintintheshow.co.uk/

It's on at the Playhouse Theatre, Northumberland Avenue, London till Jan 12.

Call 0870 060 6631 now.

(To El Reg: I have no affiliation whatsoever with the production.)

[Les Matthew]

Eurotrash anyone?

I'm sure I remember seeing a pr0n version of a Tin Tin comic previewed on that tv program sometime back in the 90's.

That's today's bit of useless trivia out of the way then.

[anarchic-teapot]

@GrahamT

The original Tintin stories were written in French, not Flemish; the name Hergé, which is simply the intials R.G. pronounced French-style, being a strong clue.

Numéro bis has nothing to do with ISDN either (the album dates back to 1963), it's either a social security number the given to immigrant workers in Belgium (as far as I can make out), or a reference to the French practice of using "bis" to distinguish between houses with the same number - e.g. 12, 12 bis - where in English we would use 12, 12a.

(PS Is this the right icon for gratuitous pedantry?)

[Mr Larrington]

Tintin The Revolutionary

No, really.

http://tintinrevolution.free.fr/pages/image001.html

[GrahamT]

@anarchic-teapot

Yes I was wrong. "Numero bis" is the recall key on a french phone. Unfortunately the trees got in the way of the wood - but then I am not a professional translator.

I was in the Brussels Comic book museum on Saturday, and saw that Belgian comic books were/are always published in both languages. The early Tintin's had Milou as Bobby in Flemish. I just wondered why English translations, which came many years after, didn't use Bobby rather than create a new name. After all Bobby is quite acceptable as dog's name in English (e.g. Greyfriars Bobby)

[Jared Earle]

@GrahamT

The reason the UK/US translators didn't call him Bobby was that they translated from the French, not from the translated Flemish version. The Flemish translators and the English translators were probably working on the book at the same time (there was no email in 1929) and didn't discuss with each other what they were doing.

The English language Asterix BDs (Bandes Dessinées = Comics) are amongst the finest translations I've ever seen, with the translators finding cultural references and puns that fitted in the speech bubbles dictated by the original French version.

[Daniel]

@ Mr Larrington

cheers for the ref to Comrade Tintin ... simultaneously brilliant and insane piece of work. Tintin as a working class ne'er-do-well that's always up for a bit of action is a great idea. It all gets pretty wacky towards the end though.

[Chris]

Motion Capture: the impatient Director's Snake Oil

If this film is all 3D, presumably in the Tintin style (else what's the point?), as the story suggests, Motion Capture is a BAD idea. When will directors realise that, unless you're doing a digital character inserted into live-action, motion-capture is the lazy man's solution to animation.

Hergé's style, as accurate to detail and mechanical realism as it was, was still located very much in the comics world. Animated characters should NOT move and interact exactly as real-world humans do. It's a mis-led fusion of two worlds that don't coexist well. One of the reason's for Pixar's success is a strict rule that characters are 'hand-animated' (or puppeteered as it were).

An (fully) animated movie must be less about technology and how clever you were in making it than in how it entertains and creates fantasy - chuck out the giant motion-tracking setups and capture pipeline software and invest rather in gifted animators.

[Gianni Straniero]

NSFW

Tintin, translated & transposed to the North East of England:

http://www.dubtoons.com/

[triky]

what what?

since when did tintin get an american passport to become a hollywood reporter? i must have missed that episode.

i would love them to do the story on the Lotus Bleu. that one was my favorite !