The Adventures of Tintin trailer

[CaptainCanada]

The UK trailer, a little blurry, but there's no obscuring of talking like the teaser.

I'm told that Spielberg will be submitting this for Best Animated Film at the Oscars this year, since he believes the look is stylized enough and the backgrounds are animated (the Academy's past stance is that motion capture by itself is not an animation technique).

 

[Trek4Ever]

It looks like a lot of fun! Maybe it will do better than people expect.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Still looks too uncanny, but at the same time, I feel they really captured the comic still well from the looks of it. But I think I would have been happier if they had went with 2D animation.

 

[Kegg]

Still looks too uncanny,

People have giant bulbuous noses. I don't think it comes close enough to the valley to feel uncanny.

I am curious why a film by an American and a New Zealander is so full of British accents, though.

 

[CaptainCanada]

I am curious why a film by an American and a New Zealander is so full of British accents, though.

Because everybody's European, and Europeans in American films speak with British accents.

 

[Kegg]

Because everybody's European, and Europeans in American films speak with British accents.

What, really?

That... doesn't make any sense.

*glances at Jean-Luc Picard*

But point taken.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

Let's look at the alternatives.

If they have German accents, they're Nazis.

If they have French accents, they're Pepe LePew.

If they have Italian accents, they're Father Guido Sarducci.

If they have Spanish accents, they're Zorro.

European accents are unusable in cartoons unless you're going for comedy, because they have far too many pre-existing comic overtones.

And it's not just cartoons - Picard with a French accent would have been a disaster. To be blunt, Americans have been trained not to take anyone with a French accent seriously. The audience would have laughed at the poor guy.

This phenomenon has been going on far longer than any of us have been alive. Instead of Father Guido Sarducci, I could have used Chico Marx as an example. A century ago, cartoonists were making fun of German accents in the Katzenjammer Kids. No filmmaker wants to fight baggage that heavy.

 

[Kegg]

You're forgetting the obvious choice, though:

American.

I expect when Americans make an American version of something, they don't decide it should sound like a British version instead. It's like if Americans remade Let The Right One In as a British vampire film, or whatever.

To be blunt, Americans have been trained not to take anyone with a French accent seriously. The audience would have laughed at the poor guy.

Americans did not seem to have a problem with Marion Cotillard in Inception. There's a difference between an actual French accent and a put upon exaggerated comic voice that I think most people are capable of noticing.

 

[Temis the Vorta]

American accents are only appropriate for American characters. Othewise - why is some American kid living in France (or Belgium or wherever)??? If you want Tintin to be foreign but free of confusing and largely comic associations, a British accent is the only alternative.

Also, if the story takes place before 1776, nobody is allowed to have an American accent, which is why an American actor playing a Roman emperor has to have a British accent (ie, Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus).

I expect when Americans make an American version of something, they don't decide it should sound like a British version instead. It's like if Americans remade Let The Right One In as a British vampire film, or whatever.

If it takes place in America, post-1776, then the characters can be American and the problem is avoided.

For that matter, I suppose Tintin would work just as well if he were simply transported to Cleveland and turned into an American character. His adventures are largely in "foreign lands" anyway.

Americans did not seem to have a problem with Marion Cotillard in Inception.

I don't think anybody cared about her or her character one way or the other. But nobody was expected to take her seriously as an authority figure in that movie. She was barely a character at all, more like a mannequin.

 

[Kegg]

American accents are only appropriate for American characters. Othewise - why is some American kid living in France (or Belgium or wherever)???

Belgium, and I'd prefer if they just straight up Americanized him, frankly. I don't greatly care either way, even if this does appear to be the first American film actually based on a comic book I read as a kid.

I don't think anybody cared about her or her character one way or the other.

Nobody was laughing, however, so the notion that American audiences view European accents as inherently comic I think is confusing the comic role exaggerated forms of those accents have had.

Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds is another example. I'm pretty much just saying the first ones that come into my head here.

 

[JD]

I've never read the comics, but I've been following this one because of the people in front of and behind the camera. Based off of this trailer it looks like it should be alot of fun.

 

[coolghoul]

As somebody who has read some of those comics, I think the film looks amazingly like the comic. There is no way that Snowy could do the Snowy-like things and be a real dog. And if you were going to CGI the poor guy might as well make him so much like the comic, that everything else needs to be the same comic too.

It's been a while since I read it. I'm trying to recall the origins of each. Cuthbert Calculus is probably a brit. Thomson and Thompson can't be otherwise. Captain Haddock was probably an American. Not sure about Tintin now...

Wikipedia, here I come...

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

The English translations of the series use an Anglicised idiom and essentially read as if the characters are British. As a life-long fan of the series I'm very glad they went with British accents rather than American ones.

 

[byron lomax]

Looks.......okay. Sounds pretty good - the actors have the voices down pretty well I think (though I'm not sure about Haddock being a Scot).

I didn't like the teaser, but the trailer has upped the expectation, a little bit.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

It's been a while since I read it. I'm trying to recall the origins of each. Cuthbert Calculus is probably a brit. Thomson and Thompson can't be otherwise. Captain Haddock was probably an American. Not sure about Tintin now...

Most of the major characters are Belgian in the original French language editions. The Little, Brown and Company English translations made a concerted effort to recast most of them as British. No direct mention is made of their nationality in the translations (or at least not in the albums available in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, which excluded Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo), but names of characters and places and the idiom in which characters speak are constructed to give a distinctly British impression.

 

[Kegg]

The English translations of the series use an Anglicised idiom and essentially read as if the characters are British. As a life-long fan of the series I'm very glad they went with British accents rather than American ones.

But... those were British translations, intended to localize the product, why they should follow their form while ignoring the - oh, forget it.

Asterix was better anyway.

 

[Out Of My Vulcan Mind]

But... those were British translations, intended to localize the product, why they should follow their form while ignoring the - oh, forget it.

The British translations are the editions most people in the English-speaking world are familiar with and what most English-speaking Tintin fans grew up reading. They certainly weren't only sold in the UK itself. So the film will be in French, with the original names from the Franco-Belgian editions, for its release in France and Belgium, giving Tintin readers there an adaptation in keeping with their experience of the books. The English language film will draw on the idiom set by the English translations, giving fans familiar with those editions an adaptation that mirrors their experience of the books. Makes sense to me. I don't see any good reason for an Americanization, on the other hand.

Asterix was better anyway.

Both are great series. Tough call between them, but I'd rank Tintin a little higher.

 

[Greylock Crescent]

In the trailer there's a real problem with matching the mouth movements to the dialogue. It looks completely unnatural -- on par with, say, the Neimoidians in TPM.

 

[davejames]

Sorry, but this animation style still isn't doing it for me. No matter how improved the technique might be, I'm still getting the same weird Polar Express vibe from it. The blank faces, the floating bodies, the limbs that don't move quite right...

It's a shame, because there's no reason this story couldn't work equally well with regular CG animation.

 

[Kegg]

It looks completely unnatural -- on par with, say, the Neimoidians in TPM.

You may want to watch the Nemoidians again. Not saying that trailer's perfect, but it's a clear notch above the vague lip-flapping of those suits.

Incidentally for a film so expensive those Nemoidian costumes still look unforgivably cheap, but I disgress.

I don't see any good reason for an Americanization, on the other hand.

The logic behind Americanizing the product is basically identical to that behind the Britishifying it in the first place... so you don't follow it why, exactly?