Tintin has been spiced up with longer action scenes and a climatic battle

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21: For readers unfamiliar with the comic book exploits of Tintin, as created by the Belgian artist Herge, you really don’t know what you’re missing.

I grew up with Tintin from an early age. His numerous expeditions to distant lands across the world to the very surface of the moon itself — were the stuff of raw childhood imagination.

Herge’s cast, from boy-hero Tintin to his impetuous dog Snowy and the bellicose Captain Haddock, were imbued with a likeability and warmth hard to accurately put into words.

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson obviously share the same enthusiasm.

Tintin has been adapted for the big screen, except he doesn’t reside in the worlds of cartoons or live-action. Here, the process called motion-capture has been employed to paint a unique landscape somewhere between the two mediums, with flesh and blood actors digitally rendered into close facsimiles of Herge’s classic illustrations.

Does it work? Well…most of the time. Motion capture is a dangerous business. More often than not, the technique produces a factor called “uncanny valley”, where the characters look just close enough to living, breathing human beings to evoke fear in the audience rather than identification.

One of the most infamous examples would be The Polar Express, where the characters occupied an unnerving realm more mannequin than human. Other filmmakers have used different techniques to circumvent this problem, such as in Avatar when James Cameron exaggerated the facial features of his blue-skinned aliens to avoid the uncanny valley effect.

In the case of The Adventures of Tintin, playing at Southside Cinema from December 21 onwards (in 3D no less), Spielberg has taken advantage of the caricature-like appearances of Herge’s drawings to leap over the uncanny valley. Tintin and co. are vaguely cartoonish in their looks, but not to the point of being grotesque. The best adventure movies always need to come with a finely-tuned atmosphere of mystery and grandeur, and arguably for the first time since Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg nails it. (Appropriately enough, Spielberg first learned of Tintin when he came across a French review comparing his film to Herge’s creation.) But does he nail the humanistic spirit of Tintin?

Fusion

The narrative, a fusion of three separate stories by Herge, has Tintin hunting for the Unicorn, a ship lost to savage pirates a few centuries ago. Tintin eventually encounters a descendent of the ship’s captain, Archibald Haddock, and together the two set off to unravel the mystery lurking within the Haddock bloodline, all the time bedeviled by the menacing Ivan Sakharine, who carries his own personal ages-old grudge against the Haddocks.

Oddly enough, the original books by Herge were short on action, at least the more visceral kind that fans of summer blockbusters have come to expect. They’re actually quite laid-back and cozy for the most part, spending more time shooting the breeze with the heroes instead of throwing the reader from one explosive set piece to another.

Antagonists were also of secondary importance to Herge; they ranged from drug smugglers to corrupt officials and acted as instigators for the plot, but Herge rarely invested them with any real development. Sakharine, who was a very minor player in Herge’s book but now muscled up into a more cinematic force aligned against Tintin and Captain Haddock, is meant to remedy this comic-to-screen dilemma.

Spielberg and Jackson have also tried to spice things up a little with longer action sequences, but a climactic battle between two giant cranes — a scene that can’t be found in the books — comes off as forced and shoehorned into the plot to provide a more traditional good guy vs. bad guy duel to satisfy a formula-addicted audience.

Still, perhaps viewers who haven’t read the books wouldn’t notice any incongruities.

If you’re looking for solid family entertainment that children and adults alike can enjoy, you certainly can’t go wrong with The Adventures of Tintin.

It will give the little tykes a wonderful thrill for the holiday season, and hopefully, they will also be encouraged to explore the boy reporter’s voyages on the printed page.