The Adventures of Tintin

Could this be Spielberg’s most underrated film? It’s his only stab at animation, and it moves like Raiders of the Lost Ark on caffeine.

Ace reporter Tintin is a pale, round-faced young man with a tuft of marmalade hair perked on his forehead and a fondness for pants that come down to just an inch below the knee. He doesn’t really have to work for stories, they come to him. No sooner has he picked up a model sailing ship at a flea market than he finds himself at the center of an intense bidding war for the self-same object. When he refuses to sell, the model is stolen from his home and a stranger is gunned down on his doorstep.

Hidden in the ship is one third of a treasure map. The dastardly Ivanovich Sakharine has his hands on a second section and means to piece the whole thing together, but he also needs the drunken sea captain Haddock to help him decipher it. Fortunately Tintin helps the skipper escape Sakharine’s clutches and then the race is one for the missing third, which is in the possession of an Arab sheikh with a fondness for opera.

Such antics might seem positively antiquarian. Like Indiana Jones, Tintin exists in a lost world of colonial exploration and adventure. His Belgian creator, who signed himself Hergé, was 15 when Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, and 26 when King Kong climbed the Empire State. His stories cling to the romance of those tall tales, real and imaginary.

A shoot-out and chase in an old steamship is expertly handled, but the sequence moves up a gear when Tintin and the permanently inebriated Haddock are stranded in a rowboat, then another when they commandeer a sea plane that’s running out of fuel – and the best is yet to come: a gravity-defying race through the Casbah which bends physics with the glee you can only find in 3-D animation.

It’s delirious stuff, often laugh-out-loud funny, which isn’t surprising with screenplay writers like Steven Moffat (the writer behind the BBC’s Dr Who and Sherlock Holmes revivals), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block). A running gag in which Snowy is always a step ahead of his newshound pal is especially sweet.

Visually dazzling.

Jordan Mintzer, Hollywood Reporter

The virtual world allows Spielberg to devise shots that never seem to end, tracking down impromptu zip lines as if the camera had wings.

Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper