French editions of the Tintin movie books

At least some of those books we posted about recently will reach the people of France and Belgium, with entirely different covers. And they have new images on them!

Here’s the one about the wallets and the pickpocket. I’m not entirely sure what Tintin is doing. He looks like he’s thinking, trying to see something in the distance, maybe a car driving away. He almost looks like he’s squinting, or maybe he looks sad…The Thompson’s pose is familiar to us by now.

Nice new look at the Unicorn in the desert. I really, really want to watch this on a big IMAX screen, the mist and sails flying out at me in 3D, sailors firing cannonballs at Red Rackham and slicing at each other on deck…Every time I see a picture of the Unicorn, it looks so much like THE Unicorn, I get tired of looking at it on the cover of a book or on a poster. It’s literally Hergé’s ship cut and pasted out of the albums. I’ve SEEN it on paper before! Now I want to see it really SAIL…

The same could be said for the Karaboudjan. This doesn’t look like the Karaboudjan. It IS the Karaboudjan! And I can’t wait to see it come to life. Tintin fans, even if you for whatever reason dislike the look of the character’s in the new movie, I really think you should go see it and enjoy it for the sake of exploring in three dimensions the world Hergé drew. In my opinion, Weta hasn’t been given enough credit for how wonderfully they’ve recreated Hergé’s worlds. Marlinspike…the ocean…the desert…How many times did Tintin take us to those places?  Now Spielberg and Jackson are letting Tintin take us there again, at least once more…and it all looks REAL without losing, somehow, Hergé’s cartoonish style.

So many questions have been raised about Tintin: Who were his parents? Why did he only spend most of his time with a dog for the first books? Why doesn’t he ever answer to a boss or write a paper? I think the questions themselves are out of place, because the stories don’t really focus on Tintin but on his adventures, on the wonderful things he did in the exotic places he took us to. So of course it was important that Weta animate Tintin’s world right. In my opinion they could not have done a better job. So if you somehow don’t fall in love with the character’s, the storyline, the jokes, the action or just the fact that a movie this good is coming to IMAX, I recommend you go and see the movie just to take a look around the Karaboudjan or crash land in the desert. It’ll be worth watching again and again…