A Film Canon

At one level, The Adventures Of Tintin works better than most rotoscoped films,  since the uncanny valley opened up by rotoscoping, the tendency to both encourage and thwart identification, is also that of the comic book experience itself. As a result, Herge's tendency to subsume dialogue into monologue, and mannerism into meme, works quite well cinematically, especially in the case of Tintin's (Jamie Bell) own particular combination of speaking and thinking, which tends to drive the narrative. Unfortunately, Herge's visual style makes for a peculiarly profound mismatch with rotoscoping technology, since not only is his elegance and sublimity decidedly two-dimensional in nature, but it actually feels modelled on the classical animation of the 1930s and 1940s - less a series of nascent film frames than a series of carefully selected and organised animation cells (and the only other feature-length Tintin film, 1972's Tintin And The Lake Of Sharks, took this into account by creating an entirely new Tintin narrative, under Herge's supervision, and then releasing the book subsequently, as an adaptation of the film). From that perspective, the challenge - and sacrilege - at play is somewhat akin to that of transforming Snow White And The Seven Dwarves, Pinocchio, or any other canonical instance of classical animation into a rotoscoped film - and, while that doesn't invalidate the project, it does turn it into something which has to be understood entirely on its own terms. Yet this is difficult to do, since the film's aesthetic signature is little more than a sheepish attempt to rein it back in to the two dimensions it really deserves (or to make it approximate the wonderful television series, referenced in the opening credits.) Throughout, Spielberg revels in reflective and refractive surfaces, sublime, glassy curvatures that subsume three dimensions back into two dimensions, as if our 3-D glasses were actually 2-D glasses, allowing us to pretend that we're simply reading the comic book through the bubble of light that segues the 2-D credits into the 3-D film in the first place. What few overtly 3-D gestures remain tend to centre around a ground-level incredulity at 360-degree vistas, often from Snowy's perspective - and while this is occasionally awe-inspiring, it does feel like the aesthetic of a sandbox game without the autonomy, somewhat like an installment in youtube's sandbox tour subgenre. In the end, it feels as if Spielberg should have made a live action film, a 2-D animated film, or simply affixed his name to the video game released subsequently - even if it looks like a draft for Uncharted 3, it's still the most unified and sophisticated aesthetic experience, and the movie plays more as extended advertisement for it than anything else.