Steven Spielberg, absent from the directorial scene since 2008, is back in a big way with “The Adventures of Tintin,” a crazy, pleasantly campy, and all around thrilling film based on the much-loved comics by Belgian artist Herge (unknown to me but acclaimed by others). It is no small wonder to me that Spielberg himself claimed it as the inspiration for his and George Lucas’ classic “Indiana Jones” franchise, and I’ll agree that Spielberg, with his unique blend of blisteringly-paced action and heart-string manipulation, was the perfect helmsman for this new series.
Quite simply, “The Adventures of Tintin” is everything that “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” should have been. If “Indiana Jones” is going to be in the adventuring business as long as George Lucas seems to want him to be, Spielberg should consider making future installments into animated features like “Tintin.” This particular brand and style of animation lends itself perfectly to the Saturday morning serial aesthetic and atmosphere that makes Indy so enduringly popular. It might even serve to make George Lucas’ increasingly bizarre story ideas more palatable to audiences.
“Tintin” is perfect proof of concept in this way. It has a story that succeeds in spite of a really fruity-sounding subtitle (“The Secret of the Unicorn”) and action scenes that spit in the face of physics and logical sense in equal measure. It works because the animation, though lifelike enough to keep us involved, is not grounded in any fundamental state of reality.
Audiences were jarred in “Crystal Skull” when a live-action Indiana Jones survived a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator, and were turned off completely when a flying saucer blasted off from underneath a Mayan temple. This is because Jones, while clearly an element of pulp fiction, is still registered subconsciously as a flesh and blood character that could plausibly exist in our world. Viewers can only take so much of the supernatural or extraordinary in films that are live action, because the illusion of reality will naturally limit their suspension of disbelief, no matter how detailed the visual effects are.
“The Adventures of Tintin” gets away with so much because it has no such restrictions. The entire movie consists of special effects, so the only reality we have to reference during our experience of the film is that of the film itself. That’s why we can see one pirate ship riding a wave over another, a character surviving a crash while sitting on an airplane’s nose, and two cranes “sword fighting” with their arms, without batting an eyelash.
It also helps, to be sure, that this is the single most thrilling piece of adventure mythos that Spielberg has cranked out since his “War of the Worlds.” It is joyful escapism in the classic tradition, a visual playground made out of kinetic energy and breathless motion. The animation is jaw-droppingly gorgeous, rivaling Pixar’s best (and maybe even surpassing it). And the 3D, while not entirely necessary for the fullest enjoyment of “Tintin,” does actually add quite a bit of depth to the experience, in much the same way that it did for James Cameron’s box-office extravaganza “Avatar.” It never feels gimmicky, cheap, or exploitative. I went into the film largely to see if Spielberg, one of our great American directors, would find a way to use the technology artistically. I was not disappointed.
It’s not a perfect film, but the only critiques I have are relatively minor. The ending feels too open, and doesn’t quite pay off as well as earlier sequences suggested it would. In addition, Spielberg does at points seem to get drunk on the freedom that filming on a digital frontier can provide, and his hot-dogging with swooping camera movements occasionally draws more attention to the computer-generated “wonderland” setting than is really necessary, especially during some of the more frenetic action set pieces. He never forgets the basics of his craft, nor does his experimentation ever knock us out of sync with the story. He simply has a tendency to go overboard here that I have never noticed before. Being a sometimes overly enthusiastic storyteller myself, I can’t say as I blame him. A kid suddenly presented with all of the finest toys in existence will use them with exuberance and vigor that matches the excitement of finding them at his fingertips. Steven Spielberg’s flights of fancy have entertained us for decades. No one more richly deserves the right to play.
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