Peter Jackson’s Wingnut production company have signed a deal with the Stradella Road online marketing company. Stradella handled the Lord of the Rings promotion and will be handling The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. This deal covers all of Wingnut’s productions for the next few years

Press Release: Peter Jackson signs Multi-year Deal with Stradella Road

A couple of interesting bits of cast news.

Gad Elmaleh, a Moroccan who has achieved success by doing one man shows and very well received French language films is to play Omar Ben Salaad. Interestingly, Salaad only appears in The Crab with the Golden Claw so it looks like the film is going to weave several stories together.

Before the film title was announced I speculated that The Crab with the Golden Claws would be the first film because it introduces Captain Haddock. The appearance of Salaad suggests that the film will cover Tintin meeting Haddock and then discovering the Unicorn’s treasure. This would form a good story arc but leaves a lot to fit in one film.

The other bit of casting news is that Toby Jones, best known as Dobby the House Elf from the Harry Potter films, will be playing the pickpocket Aristides Silk who appears in The Secret of the Unicorn.

Source: Anchors aweigh for ‘Tintin’

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The web comic, Full Frontal Nerdity, ran a strip on the Tintin Movie.

Aaron Williams, creator of Full Frontal Nerdity does have a point. It is going to be very difficult for the film to walk that line between being faithful to the source material and bringing it up-to-date for a modern audience. The ideas behind Tintin, such his faithful dog Snowy, are very dated and out of place in our cynical culture.

But this I see as the great opportunity for the films.

Tintin is a way of reintroducing the idea an innocent hero. The true, upright figure that you can respect. We may be a massively different society now than we were when Tintin was first created but humans always have a need for escapism. We need our heros to ride in on their white-horses as a distraction from troubles of our world.

At the European Comics Festival in Angouleme there was a live video link to Peter Jackson and Steven Spielberg how very briefly talked about the film. Forbidden Planet have an audio recording. It is not very good quality and the interesting bit starts at 3:10.

From our Continental Correspondent: the Tintin movie – Spielberg and Jackson speak at Angoulême

If you want to work on the Tintin movie, now is your chance.

Weta Digital (Peter Jackson’s production company) is looking for LA-based artists with experience in Motion Builder for a limited period shoot. Immediate start. Applicants should be technically competent and comfortable working within a team that is processing a high-volume of data.

Market Saw has the full gen: Know Motion Builder? Weta Looking For TDs For Tintin

This image of a smartly dressed, clean cut, young man comes from a documentary I was watching last night. Filmed in 1940s in Belgium I could not help noticing how like Tintin this man appears. Tintin was already very successful in Belgium at the time so has this young man’s appearance been influenced by Tintin? Or is that many young men looked liked this during the 1930s & 40s and Herge just based Tintin’s appearance on what he saw around him?

The still comes from a documentary series called Nazis: A Warning from History. This young Tintin look-a-like is signing up to fight for the Germams in the Flemish Regiment of the Waffen-SS, the 27th SS Volunteer Division Langemarck.

One of the lesser known facts about the SS is that they recruited in all the countries occupied by the Germans. Volunteers were attracted by not only the prestige and pay of the Waffen-SS but by the anti-communist propaganda. One only has to look at Tintin in the Land of the Soviets to see the right wing, anti-communist stance of many in Belgium around that time.

The documentary, Nazis: A Warning from History, is heartily recommended. Made by the BBC it is the best work on Hitler and explains how he rose to power and why, despite of everything, the Germans fought to the bitter end. You can watch the series on You Tube and the image above comes from this episode (at 4:03). The series includes many interviews with people on all sides who were involved in the war including a Flemish SS volunteer who was involved in war crimes.

The racism and colonialism found in the early works of Herge and his work for a German controlled paper during the war casts a long shadow over Tintin. But to me, this is not something Tintin fans should hide or shy away from. The important story of Herge’s life is that is that he recognized how blinkered and distasteful his worldview was and that he changed. Once having made that change, he then spent the rest of his life to educating and informing children of how humans around the world can be simultaneously very different and yet very much the same.