Tintin Forums

What I think many film makers (and fans) forget is that comics is a completely different medium with it is own strengths and weaknesses. To think of a comic as a snapshot of a film is missing a huge amount of the medium though many comics work like this. Simple comics like X-Men are in many ways snapshots and thus convert into half-decent films.

But comics are much more than that and this is why Watchman as a comic is great and only ok-to-good as a film.

Time, how it flows and how the reader can manipulate it, is fundamental to comics and is probably the most distinctive aspect of the medium. Understanding Comics expertly delves into this issue.

How well Tintin translates into a film is down to the filmmakers but there is nothing fundamental about how Herge used the comic medium that will stop it. Tintin is a simple comic (in terms of how it uses the medium) and has strong visuals so it will probably translate well.

The hard part will be the pacing of the story. Most (none?) of the books follow the traditional three act/reel construction. It is more a constant stream of events with very little build up of tension. An obvious consequence of how the work was originally written but unsuitable for a film. This is (I suspect) why Crab / Secret / Rackham have be combined into the two films as these have the most coherent plot development.

I'm very hopeful for the Tintin movie. Peter Jackson with LOTR and Stephen Moffat with Dr Who have proven they take well loved source material and with love and care, craft it into something new. Spielberg's involvement is more worrying.

Yes, I have. And have you seen the Nelvana version?

I agree with you that not all adaptions of existing stories are good - but that does not mean that all adaptations are automatically bad. Just as not all original stories are automatically good. Especially not stories based on existing characters. (I'm sure there are fans of Ian Flemming's work who can't stand the modern day James Bond movies, for example.)

That's why, to answer your original question, I do intend to go see the movie. We'll be in a better position to judge it afterward.


My biggest problem with the Princess is how she immediately plead for Zorrino's life. She never met him before - how does she know his name? It's this lack of logic in the Belvision adaptation, as well as in "Lac aux requins" and "Oranges Bleus" which turns me off non-Hergé's Tintin. They seem to just assume no one will pick up on it because it's just for kids.

And it's the problem I hope we won't have now that fans of the comics are in charge.

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I'll definitely go and see it, no matter how bad it is.
I mean, how far can Spielberg and Jackson go wrong?