Archive for March, 2007
Tintin Is Off To The Movies
He reached the moon more than a decade ahead of Neil Armstrong and had logged time in far-flung locales ranging from Peru to the Sahara Desert to Tibet before he was even old enough to vote.
Now, the world famous boy reporter featured in a series of hugely- popular comic books by the late Belgian artist Herge is slated to make his big-budget movie debut.
On Friday, it was announced that Steven Spielberg’s Dreamworks Studios has begun work on a film version of one of the 23 Tintin adventures Herge - real name Georges Remi - penned between 1929 and his death in 1983.
The film-maker had reportedly been negotiating the rights to make a big-screen adaptation of Tintin - the books have sold 220 million copies worldwide and been translated into 77 languages - for at least 25 years.
In each of the books, young journalist Tintin, his faithful dog Snowy and a supporting cast that includes colourful characters such as the whisky-loving Captain Haddock and absent-minded Professor Cuthbert Calculus get embroiled in a danger-fraught mystery, investigation or treasure hunt where they are chased by evildoers and end up saving the world.
Though Tintin’s fans the world over will be hoping for a similarly happy ending when Spielberg’s version of the character hits screens in 2009 or 2010, past attempts to make movies of children’s literary classics paint a cautionary tale that the director would do well to heed.
COMIC BOOK FOR EVERYONE
The most obvious question Spielberg will have to address in putting together his Tintin adaptation - besides the yet-to-be-settled issue of whether it will be a live-action movie or an animated work - is who will make up the target audience for the film.
Visit any bookstore or library and Tintin’s adventures will inevitably be found in the children’s section, but that doesn’t mean their appeal is limited to those under the age of 12.
With settings that include Bolshevik-era Russia, China during the Japanese colonial period and even the British-controlled Palestine of the 1940s, many of Herge’s meticulously researched stories are politically charged and decidedly adult in tone.
Spielberg himself has cited the books as a strong influence on his Indiana Jones series and he’d be wise not to stray too far from Herge’s and his own Herge-inspired formula in bringing Tintin to the big screen.
Recent adult-friendly movies such as Shrek and its sequel may be a sign that the patronising tone of past entries in the kids’ film genre is giving way to a more mature approach - one where the youngsters are entertained and their parents are tossed a few in-jokes that only grown-ups would get - but there is still the danger that Spielberg could go the Jumanji or Night at the Museum route.
Those films, which have superficial similarities to Tintin in their exotic-adventure-themed plots - they were adapted from children’s books by American Chris Van Allsburgh and Croat Milan Trenc, respectively - purported to have some appeal to adults but came off as little more than cinematic amusement park rides.
RETAINING HERGE’S VISION
Unlike the one-off books that were the basis for those earlier films, Tintin is the work of an artist who spent a lifetime crafting only two-dozen tales.
Still, the director will have to decide how closely to keep to Herge’s vision and how much of his own undeniable story-telling talent to bring to the table.
With just about any translation from book to film, a director has to tread a tightrope between producing too slavish an adaptation and veering too far from the spirit of the original work.
Box office blockbusters that they were, the Hollywood versions of Dr Seuss classics How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat - 2000’s The Grinch starred Jim Carrey while Mike Myers played the title role in the 2003 version of the latter - were roundly slammed for doing the near impossible and making the characters and settings too cartoonish.
As difficult as it must have been for Carrey to over-act the part of The Grinch, his performance was as overcooked as director Ron Howard’s off-colour dialogue and blindingly overdone sets.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, The Incredibles director Brad Bird struck just the right balance in his 1999 adaptation of British poet Ted Hughes’ children’s classic The Iron Giant.
Far from a by-the-numbers version of the original, Bird’s film captured the spirit of Hughes’ book while adding details about the protagonist’s family situation, bringing in a US military force that wants to research the giant’s origins and even altering the ending such that the giant saves mankind from the threat of a nuclear missile.
Being that Tintin has been around since the Great Depression and most of the tales took place in a time of fascism, World War and behind-the-Iron-Curtain intrigue that no longer exists, updating is almost inevitable if Spielberg is to make his film more accessible to modern film-going audiences.
The question is whether the film-maker can succeed in pleasing attention-deficient 10-year-olds raised on video games while still meeting the expectations of their elders who grew up on Tintin’s fast-paced but far from MTV-style adventures.
It took 25 years for Spielberg to get this far in his quest to see Tintin make his movie debut, it’d be a shame if he spent the next quarter-century living it down. -
Channel News Asia