Indians love Tintin like no other comic book. In an age of dashing, computer generated comic book heroes, Tintin albums - in English and in Bengali and Hindi translations - continue to sell by the thousands. Is it any surprise then that Steven Spielberg's paean to the intrepid reporter, The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, releases in India later on Friday, six weeks ahead of its US release?Read more.
"Tintin is huge in India, perhaps bigger than in the US," says a spokesperson for Sony Pictures (India), which is releasing the film here. She says their research shows that more than 90% of the audience that watch Hollywood films in India are Tintin fans. Amazing.
Tintin's 3D adventures to land in 2011
Steven Spielberg's 3D adaptation of Tintin will take two years in post-production before it hits cinema screens, says producer Peter Jackson
Russell Tovey as Tintin in the Barbican's stage version of the classic comic strip. Photograph: Tristram KentonSteven Spielberg's 3D adaptation of Tintin is in the can, but it will be another two years before anyone sees the film due to the amount of post-production work involved, Peter Jackson has said.
Work will now start on transforming the raw footage into a finished film, explained the Lord of the Rings director, who is taking a producing credit on the project.
In London to attend the Royal gala premiere of new film The Lovely Bones tonight, Jackson told the BBC: "Tintin is great. It's made. The movie is cut together and now [we] are turning it into a fully-rendered film. So the movie, to some degree, exists in a very rough state."
The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, the first in a proposed trilogy, will feature the voice of Billy Elliot star Jamie Bell as the intrepid Belgian journalist, with regular Jackson collaborator Andy Serkis as the salty Captain Haddock. The initial plan was for Spielberg to direct the first movie, with Jackson taking the second and another unannounced film-maker the third, but studio Universal passed on the project last year, leading to a downscaling. The film will now come out under the auspices of Paramount and Sony. It is based on three Tintin books: The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treasure.
Tintin will be shot in full 3D, but Jackson confirmed that his next project as a producer, The Hobbit, would not follow suit. "[Director] Guillermo [Del Toro] wants to shoot in 35mm, old-fashioned film," he said, "which suits me, because he wants to keep it in the same space as the original trilogy".
See also BBC News. Wicked!
Billions of blue blistering barnacles, isn't it staring us in the face? Sometimes a thing's so obvious it's hard to see where the debate could start. What debate can there be when the evidence is so overwhelmingly one-way? A callow, androgynous blonde-quiffed youth in funny trousers and a scarf moving into the country mansion of his best friend, a middle-aged sailor? A sweet-faced lad devoted to a fluffy white toy terrier, whose other closest pals are an inseparable couple of detectives in bowler hats, and whose only serious female friend is an opera diva...
. . . And you're telling me Tintin isn't gay?Um okay. He then provides 'evidence'
No Mr Parris. Heroes are noble and asexual and rise above such human foibles as sexuality. Superman can never be with Lois Lane. Really. Now as for Tinky Winky and SpongeBob SquarePants, they aren't even remotely human.Background and origins: A total mystery. Tintin never talks about his parents or family, as though trying to block out the very existence of a father or mother. As psychologists will confirm, this is common among young gay men, some of whom find it hard to believe that they really are their parents' child. The “changeling” syndrome is a well-known gay fantasy.
Other sources on background: His Belgian creator, Hergé, whose only and enigmatic reference to Tintin's origins was to describe him as having recently come out of the Boy Scouts.
Early career: On January 10, 1929, Tintin first appears, spreading Catholic propaganda in the church newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle, where in his comic strip he visits Russia (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets) to describe the horrors of Bolshevism. Early entanglements with High Church religion are, I fear, all too common among young gay men.
His journalism: Claiming to be a journalist, Tintin's only recorded remark to his editor (on departing for Moscow) is “I'll send you some postcards and vodka and caviar”. For a cub reporter on his first assignment, a curious remark.
Subsequent career: Appearing sometimes as a reporter and sometimes as a detective journalist, Tintin's baffling failure to show any evidence of dispatching copy to a newspaper (except once) or any sense of deadlines in his life has always puzzled his fans. It is possible to dismiss him as a mere dilettante but more likely that he was some kind of spy. As the remotest acquaintance with (for instance) British espionage will confirm, secret intelligence has always attracted gay men. I myself applied for and was offered a post in MI6.
Domestic circumstances: Tintin does not, in fact, move in with his sailor-friend, Captain Haddock, until 1940 (The Crab With The Golden Claws). As is so often the case with male homosexual couples, a veil is drawn over how and where the couple met, but Tintin and his mincing toy dog Snowy are invited to share Haddock's country home, Marlinspike Hall. The relationship, however, is plainly two-way, for although when Haddock first meets Tintin (before the sea captain's retirement) he is drinking heavily and emotionally unstable, he is calmed over the years, settles down and is finally ennobled by his younger friend's companionship when, in Tintin in Tibet, he offers to lay down his life for him.
Other friends: Almost all male - as are their friends in turn. Indeed, only Professor Calculus displays any attraction (though frequently confused) towards the opposite sex. However, he never marries.
Thomson and Thompson: Tintin first meets the flamboyantly moustachioed couple on a cruise in 1932 (Cigars of the Pharaoh), learning to distinguish between them by their different moustaches. The Thomson and Thompson life is a fancy-dress party: the pair love dressing up in exotic costumes and are once mobbed in the street for their Chinese opera costumes (The Blue Lotus). On other occasions they are seen (often with their signature bowlers still on) in striped swimming costumes, and a variety of folkloric garbs, always absurdly over-the-top. There is no evidence that either has ever had an eye for women, let alone a girlfriend.
Rastapopoulos: Even Tintin's evil arch-enemy, a cigar-smoking movie impresario and drug dealer (alias: Marquis di Gorgonzola) who is first encountered at a banquet in Chicago (Tintin in America), is never given the blonde on his arm or villain's moll that one would expect. He remains solitary.
Snowy: The only unambiguously heterosexual male mammal in Tintin's entire universe. We know that because of Snowy's tendency to be distracted by lady dogs: a tendency in which he is consistently foiled by his master and by Hergé's plot. Pity this dog, wretchedly straight and trapped in a ghastly web of gay human males.
Bianca Castafiore: “The Milanese nightingale” is the only strong recurring female character in Tintin's life, and his only identifiable female friend. A fag-hag if ever there was one. With her plump neck and beauty spot, this vain, self-dramatising diva with an ear-splitting voice is genuinely fond of Tintin. Significantly, Bianca refuses to remember Captain Haddock's name, calling him variously Maggot, Hammock and Havoc. Equally significantly, Haddock detests the very sight of her. Perhaps most significantly of all, Tintin's creator, Hergé, hated opera.
Peggy Alcazar: So apart from a diva fag-hag, the only other remotely significant woman in Tintin's life is a curler-wearing virago. Peggy Alcazar, the butch, bitchy, bullying, cigar-smoking, hard-drinking, flame-haired wife of General Alcazar, may well have been lesbian.
Supporting cast: In fact I can count only eight figures identifiable as women (about 2 per cent) from the complete list of some 350 characters among whom Tintin moves in his life. There are no young women at all, and no attractive women, in any of his adventures.
Oh please, what more could Hergé do to flag up the subtext? Well, you say, how about a real affair of the heart, a proper gay relationship, rather than a convenient domestic arrangement with an old sailor?
Step forward Chang Chong-Cheng, the Chinese boy whom Tintin meets in The Blue Lotus when he rescues him from drowning, who later appears in his dreams, and for whom he is prepared to lay down his life, and finally rescues, in Tintin in Tibet. In this story Tintin hears of a plane crash and dreams that his friend Chang was on board but has survived. He sets out on an odyssey to Asia to find him.
Only three times in his life is Tintin seen to cry: most affectingly when he is temporarily persuaded that his friend Chang has died. But Chang is alive, as Tintin suspects when he finds Chang's teddy bear mislaid in the snow. Chang has been trapped by the Abominable Snowman. Tintin rescues him. This, written after Hergé had had a nervous breakdown and split from his wife, and the story of which he was most proud, completes a change in Tintin's outlook which begins in The Blue Lotus. Over time Tintin's attitude alters from that of a Belgian chauvinist and narrow-minded young Catholic adventure-seeker to being a tolerant, almost peace-loving, teddy-bear-hugging seeker after truth. In The Blue Lotus he sympathises with the lonely Yeti, now deprived of Chang's (enforced) company, and even refuses to call the Snowman abominable. Tintin has seen the folly of prejudice. In Hergé's last (unfinished) story, Tintin and Alph-Art, the youth is even seen as a motorbiking peacenik, wearing a CND badge on his helmet.
The time-sweep of these stories, 1929 to 1983, may have altered Tintin's attitudes but never his appearance. He remains about 16 throughout. But then, as we all know, gay men don't age as others do. He was probably moisturising.
We'll never know. Tell yourself, if you like, that it was just that Tintin hasn't yet met the right girl. Or maybe that it's only a stage he's going through. But if you expect a Belgian Catholic born in 1907 to have unmasked the hero of his blockbuster series of comic adventures as an out-gay activist and homosexual icon, you expect too much. Hergé was no Andy Warhol (Hergé's great admirer). But Snowy saw everything; Snowy knows all. And Snowy never tells.
Tintin' filming under way in LAWoohoo! Nefarious!
LOS ANGELES, Jan. 26 (UPI) -- Director Steven Spielberg began principal photography Monday in Los Angeles on his 3D motion-capture film, "The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn."
In addition to directing the movie, Spielberg is co-producing it with Peter Jackson and Kathleen Kennedy.
Jamie Bell, who has starred in "Billy Elliot" and Jackson's "King Kong," plays Tintin, "the intrepid young reporter whose relentless pursuit of a good story thrusts him into a world of high adventure," press notes for the film said.
"Quantum of Solace" and "Defiance" star Daniel Craig plays the nefarious Red Rackham in "Tintin," a film that also features the talents of actors Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook.
"The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn," which is due to hit theaters in 2011, is based on the iconic Tintin comic-book character, created by Georges Remi, who is better known by his pen name "Herge."
A second "Tintin" feature is scheduled to be directed by Jackson -- and there a third installment is possible, Paramount Pictures and Sony Pictures Entertainment said in a news release.
Confused by the cult of Tintin? You're not alone
Tintin turns 80 at the weekend as Steven Spielberg begins work on a Hollywood film of the comic book hero. He has long been a star on the Continent, but the cub reporter is almost unheard of in the United States and little more than a cult in the UK, writes Laurence Grove.
Tintin and Snowy: the intrepid duo
When, on 10 January 1929, Tintin first appeared in the children's supplement of Brussels' right-wing newspaper Vingtieme Siecle, the serialised adventure that was to follow could, at the time, have had all the makings of a transatlantic hit.
Tintin au Pays des Soviets was to portray a cruel and corrupt communist regime, where factories were cardboard cut-outs and those who spoke out against the Party were dispensed with immediately.
Unfortunately the boy scout may have ruined his chances of becoming an all-American role model in his subsequent adventures by belittling the natives in Tintin au Congo (1930) and then unveiling Mafia strangleholds and cruelty to native Americans in Tintin en Amérique (1932). Nonetheless, Europeans have largely forgiven him his flirts with Nazi sympathies (L'Étoile Mystérieuse, 1942).
So how come, as Tintin approaches 80, like Johnny Halliday, but unlike Jacques Brel, he's a famous Belgian who has not yet managed to woo the US?
Made in Britain
There is no doubting that Tintin is a Euro-hit: he has featured on stamps, phonecards and a range of products from underpants to edibles, and is to be the main subject of a new museum opening in Belgium this year. Although Herge, his creator (real name Georges Remi, 1907-1983), expressly forbade the series to continue after his death, related publications are a Rackham-like treasure trove for Moulinsart, the organisation known for its draconian enforcement of Herge's copyright estate.
Despite being a journalist, Tintin is only ever seen once with a completed articleThe now defunct chain of UK bookstores, Ottakars, was named after the Tintin book King Ottokar's SceptreThe Thom(p)son twins weren't twins, despite looking almost identicalBy comparison, recent albums of Tintin's comic-strip colleague Asterix, a relative whippersnapper at 50 this year, have, in France, outsold Harry Potter and the Da Vinci Code put together.
Even in the British Isles, Tintin's following tends to be cult rather than mass devotion. Although for many, it was the bequiffed boy's trip to Britain that sealed his longevity.
The 1938 album L'Ile Noire (The Black Island), which takes its inspiration from The Thirty-Nine Steps, is, for many Tintin's coming of age. It is this album that refines his trademark thrill-a-minute adventure format, and saw Herge perfect his clear-line style, which proved a major influence upon Andy Warhol and the pop artists. Arguably L'Ile Noire is to Herge what Macbeth is to Shakespeare.
Yet while Tintin embraced Britain, the English-speaking world never returned the compliment
Maybe he just came on to the scene too late.
The formula of a serial newspaper strip that each week had a cliffhanger ending was one that the US Sunday supplements had successfully exploited from the turn of the last century onwards. Herge in effect was doing little more than providing a Euro version of a US phenomenon.
More recently, Tintin can be seen as quite simply the Hollywood James Bond, but without the girls: he travels to exotic locations, mixing humour and gadgets as he battles the generic international baddie du jour.
Cosmopolitan character
Bond, like Indiana Jones, is a superhero without specific superpowers. And it is the idea of a Superman, or indeed a Wonderwoman, that has typically drawn North Americans to comics. In Britain a more self-effacing outlook has underlined the comic in comic, with heroes from the Beano or Topper traditionally making us laugh.
Ironically, when it comes to Tintin the person, it is perhaps his very internationality that is his undoing
The "bandes dessinees" that are the French-speaking world's equivalent have, however, been more ambiguous; a graphic creation - in France comic strips are known as the Ninth Art - on a par with New Wave cinema.
Ironically, when it comes to Tintin the person, it is perhaps his very internationality that is his undoing. Euro-characters who do well in the States - James Bond, but also those portrayed by Hugh Grant and Gerard Depardieu - often play on national stereotypes and foible-laden sophistication. Herge, however, went out of his way to deny Tintin any specific Belgicite, underlining rather his international features.
Hercule Poirot he is not. He lives in a French chateau, has no Belgian linguistic tics, and could not be imagined tucking into mussels, chips and fine chocolates. His friends and acquaintances evoke different aspects of Euroness, from the Thompson twins' bowler-hatted Englishness, Bianca Castafiore's hot-headed Italian traits, or Professor Calculus's Germanic scientific-ness.
Even the names must have seemed entirely alien to an American audience.
Indeed Tintin's sophistication is of a very different kind: Le Bijoux de la Castafiore (1963), an album in which nothing happens, plays with notions of degre zero writing. Tintin au Tibet (1960) considers the evolving status of the post-colonial Other. And the posthumous Tintin et l'Alph-Art (1986), a book about artistic creation, is essentially a work of meta-fiction.
Tintin's creator, Herge, stripped his character of BelgiciteIt is easy to see how, from afar, Herge, let alone Cuthbert Calculus, can be seen as indulging in traditional French-style philosophical beard-stroking.
Such intricacies may have worked against Tintin, with Steven Spielberg having had his planned movie on ice for years since he bought the movie rights in 1983.
The project's shortcoming was apparently US puzzlement at Tintin. One rumour suggested there were problems with an adventure hero whose only love interest appeared to be a fox terrier, to the extent that at one stage making Tintin into a girl was not out of the question.
The situation may however be changing, as filming is finally to start on a Tintin movie, to be produced by Spielberg and Peter Jackson, apparently a mixture of animation and "real-life" with extended 3-D effects.
Tintin certainly has evolved since the days of his politically incorrect misadventures, and so too has America. Perhaps in the brave new world of Barack Obama there will be more room for this white European octogenarian.
Laurence Grove, is head of French and senior lecturer at the University of Glasgow. He is also president, International Bande Dessinee Society.
I love Tintin and cannot explain it. Tintinophiles will understand. There is no point in explaining ourselves!
In America filming is supposed to begin in earnest on a trilogy of Tintin films to be directed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, using digital “performance capture” technology to create a hybrid between animation and live action. Mr Spielberg secured an option to film Tintin shortly before Hergé’s death in 1983. The delays seem to have been caused partly by American puzzlement at Tintin. In September 2008 Universal Pictures pulled out of a plan to co-finance the project. The Hollywood Reporter, a trade publication, describes the films as being about “a young Belgian reporter and world traveller who is aided in his adventures by his faithful dog Snowy”, and explains that this storyline is “hugely popular in Europe”. You can almost hear the baffled shrugs.Clearly, anybody who understands Tintin would be much more enthusiastic. More from The Economist
Tintin is not an outsider, or a rebel against the established order. He defends monarchs against revolutionaries (earning a knighthood in one book). His first instinct on catching a villain is to hand him over to the nearest police chief. He does not carry his own gun, though he shoots like an ace. Though slight, he has a very gentlemanly set of fighting skills: he knows how to box, how to sail, to drive racing cars, pilot planes and ride horses. He has few chances to rescue girls or women, moving in an almost entirely male, sexless world, but is quick to defend small boys from unearned beatings. His quick wits compensate for his lack of brawn. André Malraux, a French writer and politician, claimed that General de Gaulle called Tintin his “only international rival”, because both were famous for standing up to bullies.Hmmm... A lot of the political and historical nuances are going to be lost with an American audience, particularly if the film is directed by an American with no clue.
Tintin is grandly uninterested in money. He is indifferent when—on occasion—he is offered large sums for accounts of catching some villain. Hergé’s disdain for transatlantic capitalism is portrayed in the 1931 “Tintin in America”, in which businessmen bid each other up to offer Tintin $100,000 for an oil well. When the young reporter explains the well is on Blackfoot Indian land, the businessmen steal the land from the Indians.
See also Variety.Jackson teams with Spielberg to film Tintin
By TOM CARDY - The Dominion Post | Wednesday, 16 May 2007
Blistering barnacles! Peter Jackson has teamed up with Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg to make three Tintin movies, with cutting-edge visual effects to be created by Wellington's Weta Digital.
Jackson and Spielberg are likely to each direct at least one of the big-budget films, based on three of the 23 Tintin comic books.
The announcement comes seven months after The Dominion Post reported Jackson's wish to bring plucky Belgian reporter Tintin, his trusty dog Snowy and pals, including Captain Haddock, to the big screen.
Spielberg holds the film rights for the books by Georges Remi, better known as Herge, and has cited them as an inspiration for his Indiana Jones movies. The films will be made back-to-back.
