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Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson Taking on Tintin Trilogy!

by Alex Billington
May 15, 2007
Source: Variety

You would have never guessed it, but the power duo of Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson will be teaming up to direct and produce three back-to-back animated Tintin films for DreamWorks. I don't think this is as big of news as everyone's making it out to be, but it still is rather interesting news. For those unfamiliar with the character, Tintin is a journalist who travels around the world with his dog Snowy in a series of comic books drawn and written by the Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known as Hergé. The films will be created at Jackson's WETA Digital and will be fully 3D based on performance capture technology.

Confirmed so far is that both Spielberg and Jackson will each direct at least one of the movies, but the third director hasn't been revealed. Tintin has long been a passion project for Spielberg, who has been trying to get film rights to the comedic and adventurous book series for more than 25 years, a goal realized over the past year. Spielberg and Jackson have selected three stories from Remi's The Adventures of Tintin series, which encompassed 23 books published between 1929 and 1976.

At first I was thinking this would be a live action film, but that's just not the case, as Spielberg discusses why they decided to stick with animation.

"We want Tintin's adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Hergé created," Spielberg continued.

However, despite going down the realm of 3D animation, Jackson said that WETA will stay true to Remi's original designs in bringing the cast of Tintin to life, but that the characters won't look cartoonish.

"We're making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people --but real Hergé people!"

It's not that big of news because I imagine these will be rather quick projects that won't delay their progress on any of their other, much bigger features. I'm quite interested to see how they'll turn out, but I don't think they'll be showstopper animated films that will break any box office records. However, only time will tell once we get a glimpse of the films and what it is they'll behold.

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