tintin in america | the m0vie blog

The Adventures of Tintin: Explorers on the Moon (Review)

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Darren

To celebrate the release of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in the United States later this month, I’ll be taking a look at some of nineties animated television show. Check back daily!

Note: This is our review of the animated episode, check out our review of the book here.

After a somewhat disappointing adaptation of Destination: Moon, the series bounces back with a wonderful take on Explorers on the Moon. I honestly think that Destination: Moon and Explorers on the Moon are perhaps Hergé’s most optimistic work on the series, aside from Tintin in Tibet. Although one can detect hints of the Cold War on the horizon, informing his writing, there’s still an incredible sense of marvel at the human capacity for what seems to be impossible. While the adaptation of Destination: Moonseemed to miss the comical whimsy to focus on the sabotage subplot, it does a much better job with the more earnest joy of this space-based adventure.

One small step...

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Adventure of Tintin, Colin O'Meara, Explorers on the Moon, Hergé, moon, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, tintin, tintin in america, Tintin: Explorers on the Moon, United States | Leave a comment »

The Adventures of Tintin: Destination Moon (Review)

Posted on December 14, 2011 by Darren

Note: This is our review of the animated episode, check out our review of the book here.

I think that Destination: Moon represents perhaps the most significant challenge to the producers of the animated series so far. While they managed to harvest a plot from the disjointed collection of scenes Hergé knitted together to form Tintin in America, this is the perhaps the least standard instalment of the series they’ve tried to adapt until this point. I’m a big fan of Destination: Moon, reading it as a wonderful optimistic and enthusiastic reflection on mankind’s potential, coming from Hergé after the Second World War. However, it’s also a bit unstructured and episodic, almost a collection of short stories tied together by the plan to send a manned mission to the moon. The animated adaptation doesn’t have the luxury of cutting the adventure down to a single episode, and so it’s a standard two-parter. It seems that there was a bit of difficulty structuring the story for that format.

Blast off!

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Adventure of Tintin, Captain Haddock, Castafiore Emerald, Destination Moon, Hergé, moon, the adventures of tintin: destination moon, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, tintin in america, tintin: destination moon, United States | Leave a comment »

The Adventures of Tintin: Land of Black Gold (Review)

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Darren

To celebrate the release of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn in the United States later this month, I’ll be taking a look at some of the nineties animated television show. Check back daily!

Note: This is our review of the animated episode, check out our review of the book here.

Land of Black Gold feels like a rather conscious throwback to the earlier adventures in the series, stories like King Ottokar’s Sceptre or The Black Island or Cigars of the Pharaoh, dealing with relatively grounded political concepts and economic realities, rather than hidden treasure or lost civilisation or trips to the moon itself. Of course, there’s a very good reason – Land of Black Goldwas started before the outbreak of the Second World War, and Hergé put it on hold to write about more abstract and less political concerns. That’s why Haddock only appears in this episode five minutes from the end, because he hadn’t been created when the original story was told. I don’t dislike the adventure, but it does feel rather strange, situated where it is in the Tintin canon.

Petrol was always an explosive topic...

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Adventure of Tintin, Black Island, Captain Haddock, Hergé, Land of Blakc Gold, Shooting Star, the adventures of tintin: land of black gold, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, tintin, tintin in america, tintin: land of black gold | Leave a comment »

The Adventures of Tintin: The Blue Lotus (Review)

Posted on December 3, 2011 by Darren

Note: This is our review of the animated episode, check out our review of the book here.

While I think that the early run of stories from Cigars of the Pharaoh were among Hergé’s most impressively pulpy output, populated with opium traders and sinister conspiracies seemingly spanning the globe, I do tend to have rather eclectic taste. For example, I am quite partial to The Black Island and The Shooting Star, two of the oft-malign chapters in The Adventures of Tintin. Similarly, I’ve found myself slightly underwhelmed by widely-praised instalments like The Secret of the Unicorn or The Blue Lotus. It’s not that I think they’re bad (far from it), merely that I feel they aren’t as good. Still, the animated adaptation of Tintin in America managed to construct an engaging little adventure from a disjointed story, so I wonder how this episode will handle its source material?

Shang-hai Noon...

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Adventures of Tintin, Black Island, blue lotus, China, Colin O'Meara, Hergé, japan, Orient, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, the adventures of tintin: the blue lotus, the blue lotus, tintin, tintin in america | Leave a comment »

The Adventures of Tintin: Cigars of the Pharaoh (Review)

Posted on December 2, 2011 by Darren

Note: This is our review of the animated episode, check out our review of the book here.

This is more like it. After a single twenty-three minute episode to cover Tintin in America, Cigars of the Pharaoh gets a bit more space. It’s a very faithful take on the classic story, split over two episodes to retain as much as possible. It’s a good thing, too, as I’d argue that Cigars of the Pharaoh is easily one of the best stories Hergé ever wrote, and certainly the first truly classic entry in the series. So it’s great to see the animated series kicking everything into gear.

Mapping out the show...

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Adventures of Tintin, cigars of the pharaoh, Crab With the Golden Claws, Hergé, Pharaoh, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, The Adventures of Tintin: The Cigars of the Pharaoh, tintin, tintin in america | Leave a comment »

The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in America (Review)

Posted on December 1, 2011 by Darren

Note: This is our review of the animated episode, check out our review of the book here.

I remember catching a few of the animated Adventure of Tintin when I was smaller, and really enjoying them. They were a series produced to adapt Hergé’s stories into easy-to-digest half-hour instalments for kids. Naturally, the early adventures (Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo) weren’t deemed suitable for this form of adaptation, so the series jumped right in with the third entry in Hergé’s long-running saga. Which is grand, because I started reading The Adventures of Tintin with Tintin in America.

Tintin gets animated!

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: Adventure of Tintin, Colin O'Meara, Hergé, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin in America, tintin, tintin in america, Tintin in the Congo, United States | 2 Comments »

Tintin: Tintin and the Alph-Art (Review)

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Darren

In the lead-up to the release of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, I’m going to be taking a look at Hergé’s celebrated comic book character, from his humble beginnings through to the incomplete post-modern finale. I hope you enjoy the ride.

Tintin and the Alph-Art is a strange little story. It’s the last Tintin adventure that Hergé began before his death, more than fifty years after the intrepid reporter had debuted in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets. I’ve also found something strangely wonderful in the idea that the final Tintin pages that Hergé drew threatened to close the series forever, with the boy reporter trapped in a polyester sculpture, entombed forever as a work of art – it’s not exactly a happy ending, but I’d argue it was a fitting one. There isn’t a definitive finished version of the story available – Hergé died leaving notes and sketches and half-formulated ideas, but there’s little real sense of how he wanted the story to end, or even how he’d get Tintin out of that one final death trap. Of all the “unofficial” Tintin works out there, and there are quite a few, Tintin and Alph-Art is perhaps the one most closely associated with Hergé, drawing from a story he never finished to try to cap off a saga five decades in the making.

And then... nothing...

Note: I am discussing the “unofficial” version of the story completed by Yves Rodier. I will also make reference to the annotated Hergé script released a while back.

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Filed under: Comics | Tagged: Adventures of Tintin, Alph-Art, blue lotus, Flight 714, Hergé, post-modern, The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, The Adventures of Tintin: Tintin and Alph-Art, tintin, Tintin and Alph-Art, tintin in america, Tintin: Tintin and Alph-Art, Yves Rodier | 2 Comments »

Tintin: Tintin in America (Review)

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Darren

Tintin in America was the earliest Adventures of Tintin book I read as a child, and I owned the entire collection from this point on (for obvious reasons, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Tintin in the Congo were not recommended childhood reading). That said, I’ve always regarded Tintin in America as one of the weaker entries in the series, perhaps because my childhood imagination yearned for something relatively more exotic than a trip to North America, or perhaps because the saturation of American pop culture made all the elements Hergé was spoofing seem like old hat. I’m not entirely sure, but I have to admit that the story hasn’t improved too much on re-reading.