ANIMATION; 1hr 47min
VOICES BY: Jamie Bell, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis
Comic caper: Captain Haddock and Tintin
The motion-capture animation in director Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin is as fresh and graceful as the images in Belgian artist Hergé’s comic books that inspired it. Every line is alive, and the narrative, taken from three 1941–44 tall Hergé tales, is bursting with beans, too, mixing a trio of mysterious model ships with a crew of hooligans, a Pandora’s box of family secrets and a stash of buried treasure.
As kidnapped fugitives on a Morocco-bound vessel commandeered from the perpetually sozzled Captain Haddock (voiced by Serkis) by the devious Sakharine (Craig), gingery Brussels reporter Tintin (Bell) and his brainy terrier, Snowy, have more than enough to keep them on the hop. Paramount on their agenda are sobering up the captain, piecing together the riddle of the treasure’s whereabouts and getting to it before Sakharine and his goons while hopefully not getting themselves killed. Ship ahoy! The plucky reporter and his prodigy dog really know how to rumble, and the ever-inventive Spielberg (with producer Peter Jackson’s Weta Digital on computer effects) is just the ticket to keep their rollicking show on the road.
