Monday, January 30, 2012

Tintin Review

It’s Oscar season. For me, that means it’s time to talk about good movies. The full list of the nominees was released Jan. 24, and because this is the sort of thing that gets me thinking and writing, my next several posts will probably be related to the Oscars. Personally, the only category that I really pay attention to besides the big 5 (best movie, director, actor, actress, original screenplay) and the ones pertaining to movies I watched that year is Best Animated Film. In recent years, that category has been dominated y the excellent Pixar animation studio. Unfortunately, even though Cars 2 was a good movie, it wasn’t up to Pixar’s usual standards of excellence, and it didn’t even get nominated. Instead The Academy chose a couple of DreamWorks films (Kung fu Panda 2, Puss in Boots) and Rango, completely ignoring the Golden Globes’ pick and mine, the Adventures of Tintin.

Unlike recent movies that were adaptations of ongoing comic books, Tintin requires no prior knowledge of the source material to understand or appreciate. Like any good film, all you need to know about the plot or characters is shown through the actions and dialogue of the characters themselves. The rest of the story is told by the stellar motion-capture animation, which beautifully depicts all the action, adventure, comedy, and drama this movie has to offer. The film begins when Tintin, (Jamie Bell) buys a rare model ship from a market stall, just looking for a story for his newspaper. What he finds is wild, captivating adventure well worth writing about.  Go watch The Adventures of Tintin, and see for yourself what The Academy missed.

Colin V.