Over at Empire Online they have provided a small gold mine on Spielberg’s upcoming Tintin adaptation: The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn by presenting two completed stills from the film. Showing both Tintin, Captain Haddock and Snowy. More appear stills in this month’s issue in a massive world exclusive, right now we have two for you.
For Tintin fans, it is a relief to see that through the miracle of motion capture that the filmmakers have kept Herge’s character style. It still looks like the comic book but with improved texture and tones that add depth to the cartoonish characters. The problem with CG motion capture before, particularly with the Zemeckis productions, was that the films used them for everything including normal looking humans, which left them looking plastic rather than real. Particularly the recent A Christmas Carol, why go to that level of spending so much money to get it real via the computer when there are perfectly decent actors?
We will never reach fully CGI photo realism because our mind can tell us when something is fake. With this Spielberg and Jackson keep the comic elements, the high saturation of colours on the ocean in particular. I quite like the look of it despite some people not liking it so much, I await a trailer to be truly convinced but these first images look great.
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is to be released 28th December 2011