Tintin or the Difficult Brush-Stroke: an Eventful Journey to Mainstream Cinema

Abstract

Tintin’s success as one of the great figures of the twentieth century comics is mainly due to two reasons. One, its constant metamorphosis: from a character with fascist and colonialist connotations to an adventurer that banners humanism and justice. Two, the simple but effective style of Hergé, characterized by a simplification of the cartoons to the basic elements of the story, as well as an intuition to express movement and action. These key factors have marked the evolution of Tintin during his adventures and have also conditioned the success or failure of its adaptations to television and film. This article analyses this evolution, as well as the dialogue between the graphic image and the moving image, that have culminated in The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. This US blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg adapts the adventures of the Belgian reporter to motion capture animation, a technique whose expressive results are in conflict with the shapes proposed by Hergé.