Any fans of Tintin here?

[BruceH]

Another European comics artist I like, who's obviously in the Herge tradition, is Edgar P. Jacobs. I have english translations of two of his Blake & Mortimer graphic novels, "The Time Trap," and "Atlantis Mystery." A very similar drawing style, but less pratfall humor. Even more 'word heavy' though. If they lack some of the charm of Tintin, they're still rip-roaring adventures.

[ghost of miles]

Somehow I missed this thread the first time around--my wife & I went on a Tintin kick a few years back and picked up seven or eight of the available titles... still haven't read the highly-praised Tibet adventure, however. My search was prompted by a good article in the current (May 28) issue of the New Yorker on the "Tintin century," written by Anthony Lane. Unfortunately it's not online, although they've posted a summary of it here. (Good article in this issue as well, btw, by David Remnick on historical accounts of the Six-Day War.)

[mikelz777]

I was introduced to Tintin while sailing in the Virgin Islands. One of the other students on the trip had 2-3 of his comics and I was hooked. I think the first one I remember was Red Rackham's Treasure. I now own all 7 of the 3-fer volumes.

I was intrigued by the DVD versions of the Tintin adventures. Are they worth watching? How do they compare to the books? I hear Steven Spielberg is producing some new animated adventures.

[Stefan Wood]

They are actually pretty good. Made by Herge's studio, I believe. Basically animated versions of the books.

[ghost of miles]

I hear Steven Spielberg is producing some new animated adventures.

Apparently in some sort of conjunction with Peter Jackson (Lord of the Rings, King Kong).

[Adam]

The full story in regards to the films is they are planning to make 3 Tintin live action 3-D films, with Peter Jackson directing the first, Spielberg the second, and TBD the third. There was just a big story on it in, uh, the LA Times I believe.

[brownie]

At long last, Tintin will have a museum of his own outside Brussels. First stone was laid on Monday on the occasion of his creator's 100th birthday!

[Don Brown]

Check this week's New Yorker. There's a long piece - A Boy's World - on the 100th anniversary of Tintin by Anthony Lane.

[Kalo]

Good to see this thread revived.

I'm a little worried about those movies, though. The books are so great that it feels like they could only ruin them.

[Van Basten II]

I'm more of an Asterix fan but i've read them all.

Anybody read the first ones. Tintin au pays des soviets. Tintin in USSR, where his dog (Milou) gets drunk and Tintin au Congo, the first version with the colonial references.

Recently read that apparently Hergé died of Aids following a blood transfusion.

[4XB]

TIN TIN`S JAZZ LATIN CIGAR BAR

[Adam]

The full story in regards to the films is they are planning to make 3 Tintin live action 3-D films, with Peter Jackson directing the first, Spielberg the second, and TBD the third. There was just a big story on it in, uh, the LA Times I believe.

NY Times, actually:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/movies/2...amp;oref=slogin

Top Directors See the Future, and They Say It’s in 3-D

By SHARON WAXMAN

Published: May 22, 2007

Correction Appended

LOS ANGELES, May 21 — If some prominent Hollywood directors and an Irish rock band have their way, moviegoers en masse will soon be heading back to the future, wearing newfangled 3-D glasses.

The comicbook hero Tintin (on bike) will be the subject of a 3-D trilogy.

Last week the next phase in the theatrical viewing experience took a significant leap forward, as Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson signed on to direct and produce for Paramount’s DreamWorks Studios a trilogy of 3-D movies about the intrepid Belgian comic-book hero Tintin. And on Saturday nearly an hour of footage from the 3-D concert film of the Irish rock band U2 made its debut at the Cannes Film Festival.

As “U2 3D” demonstrates, this is definitely not the 3-D of drive-in memories. The concert film gives the audience the palpable experience of being present, as the camera swivels around Bono’s face, then soars over and down among the 60,000 concertgoers. And though the new version still requires audience members to wear glasses, they are not the old red-and-green variety but sleek black ones.

“This is a different experience; it’s much more voyeuristic,” said Jon Landau, the producer of “Avatar,” James Cameron’s ambitious and expensive movie about a battle between humans and aliens, which is currently being shot in 3-D using a combination of computer animation and motion-capture technology. “The screen has always been an emotional barrier for audiences. Good 3-D makes the screen go away. It disappears, and you’re looking at a window into a world.”

That view, however, isn’t completely clear yet. So far digital projection has been installed in only about 2,300 of the 37,000 theaters in the United States, with 3-D projection in just 700 of those. Theater owners have been slow to upgrade to expensive digital projectors, and it is an open question whether many American moviegoers will pay an extra dollar or two for tickets to 3-D films.

The 3-D film first flourished in the early 1950s, when movies like “Bwana Devil,” “House of Wax” and Disney’s “Melody” introduced audiences to the delights and annoyances of donning special glasses. But because of a combination of technological complexities, eye fatigue and a lack of compelling feature-length movies, many of the 3-D films were horror or soft-core pornography, which kept the filmmaking format on the fringes of the mainstream.

The emergence of Imax and the technological advances of the last few years, however, have piqued the interest of Hollywood’s top directors. Mr. Cameron, who made the 3-D Imax documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss” in 2003, is using motion capture technology and computer graphics to create realistic characters and fantasy worlds for “Avatar.”

Twentieth Century Fox will release that film, with an estimated $200 million cost, in 2009, mainly in 3-D. (Mr. Landau said that Mr. Cameron wore 3-D glasses — the latest have plastic rims — to look at his daily footage.)

Audiences, which have had a taste of the future in 3-D versions of children’s fare like “Monster House” and “Chicken Little,” will get another early blast of the experience in Robert Zemeckis’s adventure-drama “Beowulf,” to be released, wherever possible in 3-D, by Paramount and Warner Brothers in November.

And DreamWorks Animation SKG has announced that all of its future movies will be shot in 3-D, for release beginning in 2009.

“I believe that this is the single greatest opportunity for the moviegoing experience since the advent of color,” Jeffrey Katzenberg, the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, said in an e-mail message. “It has been more than 60 years since there has been a significant enhancement or innovation to the moviegoing experience.”

He predicted that starting in 2009, “a significant percentage of the big mainstream films will be made and exhibited in this format.”

The widening embrace of 3-D by Hollywood’s leading directors and major studios comes at a critical moment for the movie industry, which faces expanding competition for leisure time from home theaters, the Internet and games. And it also solves, at least temporarily, the continuing pressures from the thriving trade in bootleg movies. A 3-D film cannot be recorded easily from a movie screen because the images are blurry to the naked eye.

The push to 3-D may also be the impetus needed to spur movie exhibitors to switch from film projectors to digital ones, say industry executives. A digital projector can cost around $100,000, a sum that has proved prohibitive to many exhibitors. Adding the 3-D component, including the silver coating of the screen, costs about $20,000 more, but the added benefit is immediately visible, said Michael V. Lewis, chairman of Real-D, which dominates the 3-D projection business.

There is already evidence of a box office payoff. “Meet the Robinsons,” an animated Disney film, was released in early April in 3,400 theaters, of which 600 (about 18 percent) were equipped with 3-D. The 3-D theaters brought in 30 percent of the box office revenue from the first weekend, according to Disney. And a 3-D version of “Polar Express” from 2004 has been released three years in a row in Imax theaters around the winter holidays, taking in $65 million.

Greg Foster, the chairman and president of Imax Filmed Entertainment, warned that not all films were suited to the format. “Three-D isn’t a panacea — it isn’t a magic pill,” he said. “It’s a spectacular thing if it fits three specific criteria: Does it take you somewhere? Is it made by a visionary filmmaker? And is the concept behind the film organic to 3-D?”

He added: “If you’re going to do 3-D because you need a gimmick to sell tickets, the audience is too smart for that.”

Among films that have not worked well in 3-D were “Chicken Little” and “Ant Bully,” which were also not successful at the box office.

The new projects aim to be more than mere gimmicks. Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson have been working on the “Adventures of Tintin” project for about a year with Mr. Jackson’s special effects company, Weta Digital.

Part of the decision-making process included a week of motion capture work on the “Avatar” set in the Playa Vista section of Los Angeles last November. That visual information was sent to Weta in New Zealand. There it was married to a computer model of Tintin, the young, red-haired Belgian adventurer of comic-book fame, who is wildly popular in Europe though less so in this country. The results persuaded both directors to push forward with the trilogy.

Mr. Jackson is expected to direct the first film, Mr. Spielberg the second, with the director for the third undecided, according to a DreamWorks spokesman. There is as yet no start date for the first project.

Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Jackson both declined to comment for this article. Stacey Snider, the co-chairwoman of DreamWorks, also declined.

Mr. Jackson’s manager, Ken Kamins, said the director had long been fascinated with 3-D but until now had not been swayed by the ability to create a full-length feature experience. “Based on various tests he’s seen, he believes in the future of 3-D,” he said. “This is really starting to create some interesting imagery that gives the filmmaker a lot more creative license to play with.”

To shoot the U2 concert film, the directors Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington placed about a dozen cameras throughout stadiums during the band’s concert tour in Latin America last year, and shot more than 100 hours of footage. The film, co-owned by the band and 3ality Digital, a 3-D movie production company, does not yet have a distributor, but the partners expect the film to reach theaters in the fall.

Sandy Climan, chief executive of 3ality Digital Holdings, said the improved 3-D format would entice moviegoers eager for something new.

Mr. Katzenberg agreed. He predicted that after 2009, “consumers will own their own 3-D glasses in the same way they have sunglasses for going outside.”

Correction: May 26, 2007

An article in The Arts on Tuesday about plans for 3-D movies using new technology referred incorrectly to the showing of 3-D movies on DVDs. Such films can in fact be shown on DVDs, and have been.

[Kalo]

On his blog, Dave Kehr has several corrections to the article above:

Sharon Waxman’s article in the Arts section of today’s New York Times, “Top Directors See the Future, and They Say It’s in 3-D,” is riddled with errors and misperceptions, to the point where it is actively misleading.

She writes:“As “U2 3D” demonstrates, this is definitely not the 3-D of drive-in memories. The concert film gives the audience the palpable experience of being present, as the camera swivels around Bono’s face, then soars over and down among the 60,000 concertgoers. And though the new version still requires audience members to wear glasses, they are not the old red-and-green variety but sleek black ones.”

In fact, the 3-D boom of the early 50s was driven in part by the development of polarized 3-D glasses, complete with the black plastic frames that impressed Sharon. These glasses used polarized filters to separate the left eye and right eye images, in place of the crude red and green cellophane glasses (with those regrettable cardboard frames) that had long been used (and still are) to create an inexpensive 3-D illusion mainly for comic books and a few very low budget movies. The red and green system does work with DVDs, contrary to Sharon’s assertion (she sees it as a protection against piracy), and many titles are available in that format. A search on Amazon came up with 167 of them. And optometrists in the early 50s did indeed sell prescription polarized glasses, if only briefly, just as Sharon has Jeffrey Katzenberg bravely predicting they will in the distant year of 2009.

The real breakthrough driving the sudden 3-D boom is the introduction of digital projection. What killed 3-D in the 50s was not, as Sharon says, “a lack of compelling feature-length movies” but the unweildiness of the technology, which required two 35-mm projectors running side by side in perfect syncronization. If the syncronization was off by even a couple of frames, the illusion disappeared. If the projectionist burned a few frames on one print, he had to clip the corresponding frames from the other. It was a clumsy system, but when it worked, it worked beautifully. Film Forum has hosted several retrospectives of echt 50s 3-D in the last ten years, and when the process is presented correctly, it can look spectacular.

Digital projection eliminates the need for two separate 35-mm prints, and, for that matter, for any prints at all. Slipping in a digital tape cassette is something that any candy counter staffer can do — no projectionist required.

And the boom in animated 3-D has been driven by Robert Zemeckis’s discovery, during the making of the digitally animated ”Polar Express,” that only a simple computer correction was required to produce both left-eye and right-eye images, at virtually no expense.

The newest technology uses liquid crystals that reverse polarity frame by frame, which means that left eye and right eye images can be printed sequentially on film (or, more likely, recorded sequentially on digital video), and the glasses will sort them out, allowing the right eye to see only the right eye image, and the left the left image. Called LCS 3-D (for Liquid Crystal Shutter), this technology is perfectly compatible with home video and will probably be commercialized within the next few years. It was used for a while for IMAX 3-D, but for reasons unknown (economic, no doubt), the IMAX theaters have reverted to polarized glasses.

Sharon writes that “many of the 3-D films were horror or soft-core pornography, which kept the filmmaking format on the fringes of the mainstream.” In fact, the mainstream studios embraced the technology. Among the big budget 3-D films are “Hondo” (John Wayne), “Miss Sadie Thompson” (Rita Hayworth), “Kiss Me Kate’ (a major MGM musical), and “Money from Home” (Martin and Lewis). Important directors who shot 3-D films include Raoul Walsh, Douglas Sirk, Andre de Toth, Jack Arnold, Chuck Jones and Budd Boetticher. Alfred Hitchcock shot “Dial M for Murder” in 3-D, though by the time it was finished, the boom was over and the film was released flat. It has since been restored and widely shown in 3-D. A complete list can be found at Andrew Wood’s excellent site devoted to 3-D films and technology.

(Thanks to Larry Kart for turning me on to Kehr in the first place!)

[ejp626]

Don't have too much to add, other than in Jan (I think) I stopped in the Pompidou Centre and they had a exhibit devoted to Herge and Tintin. It was sort of interesting, though I didn't have the patience to try to mentally translate the text. I find the style of Tintin a little bland to my taste, but maybe if I read a whole story, I would like it more.

[Shrdlu]

I'm a big fan, Dmitry!

They made TV cartoons of a lot of the stories and we taped them years ago. The music was pretty good, too.

[Kalo]

Don't have too much to add, other than in Jan (I think) I stopped in the Pompidou Centre and they had a exhibit devoted to Herge and Tintin. It was sort of interesting, though I didn't have the patience to try to mentally translate the text. I find the style of Tintin a little bland to my taste, but maybe if I read a whole story, I would like it more.

If by "bland" you mean "well nigh perfect" then I would agree. The artwork produced by Herge's studio is practically the Platonic Ideal of comics, in my opinion -- or at least of Western European comics.

[ghost of miles]

Sales of TINTIN IN THE CONGO soar

[BruceH]

I always sort of assumed that everybody loved Tintin.