Spielberg’s Tintin only brought in $12 million over the holiday weekend, but that’s more than many people expected of the thoroughly un-American not-at-all-super hero:
Tintin is the antithesis of a superhero, which may account for why he seems so alien to Americans. He has an upswept red forelock, wears plus fours and argyle socks and lives alone with his dog, Snowy. He has no exceptional powers, no sexual identity and seemingly no inner life at all.
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Mr. Spielberg has said that he first heard about Tintin in 1983, when he learned that French reviewers were comparing his “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to some of Hergé’s work. Curious, he bought a couple of Tintin books in the original French and, though unable to read them, was immediately smitten.It’s easy to understand why. Not only is there an Indiana Jones-like quality to some of Tintin’s adventures — he’s forever discovering secret passages or getting trapped in a crashing plane — but Hergé’s drawings have an inherently cinematic quality. They look like storyboards or a movie shooting script, with close-ups, telescopic shots, jump cuts and action sequences.
Hergé, who grew up watching silent comedies, clearly loved the movies, and in 1948 even offered to adapt some of his books for Disney. The studio passed, possibly because the stories were more complicated, more grown-up, than the ones it was then making, or maybe because Hergé’s style was so unlike Disney’s. Hergé was a brilliant draftsman, and his drawings, devoid of cuteness and sentimentality, are a compelling mixture of simplicity and precise detail. Tintin’s face, for example, is just a Charlie Brown-like assemblage of dots and squiggles, but cars and airplanes are so carefully rendered that they can be identified by make and model.
Hergé’s drawings are also insistently two-dimensional, with no shadows, very little shading and not many perspective tricks. They are content to lie flat on the page. To adult fans, who have included Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, the purity and creativity of the drawing is what most recommends the Tintin series. And to readers used to the original books, the most disconcerting thing about Mr. Spielberg’s film is the way it jumps off the screen.