Decent Films Blog
Steven Spielberg’s Tintin & War Horse
It’s been well over a decade since Steven Spielberg directed a family film. Now he has two out in the same week—both based on juvenile literary source material, and both European-set period pieces, redolent of nostalgia of one sort or another.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is Spielberg’s response to a decades-old vote of confidence. Hergé, the Belgian cartoonist who created the globally popular adventure comic book hero Tintin and spent over half a century writing and illustrating Tintin’s adventures, died in 1983, but not before seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark and pronouncing Spielberg the right director for Tintin.
I’m not sure why Spielberg waited three decades before finally taking a crack at Tintin —or why he chose to work in performance-capture animation, a technique most associated with the uneven output of Spielberg’s protégé Robert Zemeckis (The Polar Express, Disney’s A Christmas Carol).
Perhaps he was waiting for the right team of collaborators. If so, you would think he found it: The story is adapted from a trio of Hergé’s adventures by “Doctor Who” honcho Steven Moffat, English comedy filmmaker Edgar Wright (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) and English comedian Joe Cornish (Attack the Block). Peter Jackson co-produced with Spielberg.