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.

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.

Tintin’s 80th Birthday is on January 10th. What are you doing to celebrate?

Tintin fan site Objectif Tintin is shutting down tomorrow after Moulinsart sent legal threats over its use of Herge’s art in its logo and other places. Under Belgian law, such usage is legal but Moulinsart is throwing its muscle around more and more. Presumably it wants tight control over Tintin in anticipation of millions of new fans, and dollars, the Tintin movies will bring in.

Source: Tintin site decides to close up shop

Tintin Movie has finally got a new design! I hope you like it. I’m still finishing off some of the details and minor pages so bare with me. If you spot anything that looks broken, please let me know.

Anyway, enjoy the new look site and especially the revamped Tintin Store.

This great image is from the Garen Ewing, a writer and illustrator who is currently doing an A-Z of comic characters. Clearly a big Tintin fan, Garen is writing and drawing a strip cartoon very much in the vein of Herge’s Tintin. The Rainbow Orchid, inspired by authors such as Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Edgar P. Jacobs and, of course, Hergé, has appeared in print but you can read the entire story (so far) online. I’m about to do that so there goes my work for the rest of the day.

On his blog, he has a good post on the current plan that all children’s books in the UK should be age banded, i.e. labeled with their target age range. This plan is worrying many children authors because so many books appeal across ages. The authors fear that labeling a book like Winnie-the-Pooh as 3 – 6 years or Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy as 10 – 12 years will put off children (and adults) outside of those ranges. As someone who came late to reading due to dyslexia and still regularly reads “children” books I think the authors fears are justified. All readers should be allowed to discover for themselves what is suitable and enjoyable to them without social pressure or fear of stigmatization.

For more on this, see Age Banding and look what image Garen illustrated the story with.

Steven Moffat, the award winning scriptwriter of Coupling and Dr Who walked away from writing the second Tintin movie.

According to the Daily Mail (so pretty suspect), Moffat was originally contracted to write the first two Tintin films for a cool £1 million. He had completed the first script and handed it over to Spielberg, director of the first film, and was due to start work on the second. However the writer’s strike happened in the US and this prevented Steven Moffat from working. During this time he was offered the Dr Who job at the BBC which he took without a moments hesitation. Not many people would walk away from £500,000 or say no to Steven Spielberg but for a lifelong Dr Who fan it was easy to do.

Moffat departure is bad news for Tintin (though great for Dr Who) because Steven has a track record of great writing and being faithful to the source material. He understands what it is like to be a fan and how the essence of the original work can be remixed in a contemporary setting without ruining it. We don’t know who is going to get or has got the job of scriptwriter for the second film but they have a tough job ahead of them.

That Steven Moffat was only given the contract for the first two films suggest that the three films are not going be tightly linked into one continuous story. More likely, each film will standalone which makes some of the casting decisions curious. The original casting list suggested the three films would be The Crab With The Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. These would form a natural story arc, focusing around Captain Haddock. However Eric Stoltz has been cast as Doctor Krollspell (apparently) who only appears in Flight 714. Krollspell is closely linked to Tintin’s nemesis Rastapopoulos but Rastapopoulos doesn’t appear in Goldren Claws, Unicorn or Red Rackham.

All of this suggests that the Tintin movies are going to draw characters and incidents from multiple books rather than closely follow a single book. This is worrying as we may be left with a mess rather than a cohesive story.

Source: £500,000 Mr Spielberg? Sorry, I’ve got a date with the Beeb, says the new Dr Who writer

Herge’s painstaking attention to detail was always at its best when dealing with the latest and future technology. Sometimes, such as the Me-109s in King Ottokar’s Sceptre, he adapts the latest technology of the time. In other books like the rocket in Destination Moon or the sound weapon in The Calculus Affair, he takes current theories and makes them real.

Yet one area that technology that Herge never explored was computers. Unlike planes and motor vehicles that came to the fore in Herge’s lifetime, computers were only really making their mark towards the end of his life. More importantly, computers don’t look exciting and make for lousy action sequences.

Despite this, I think Herge would be fascinated by the internet and the role technology plays in out lives. So he would be proud to now be part of the iTunes store. Tintin’s animated adventures can be download to your iPod. Perfect viewing for that dull commute into work.

The horse ‘Tintin In America’ isn’t a race horse as previously reported. Well, not in the normal sense. He (she? it?) is a harness racing horse where the horse pulls a little buggy on which the rider sits. In fact, here is a picture of Tintin In America in action.

Taking a break from directing the first Tintin movie, Steven Spielberg has purchased another comic for adaption. This time its Ghosts in the Shell, the Japanese manga book and TV series. Its classic manga with robots, a futuristic city scape and great characters. I’m not sure if a non-Japanese director will be able to adapted it without turning into some cookie-cutter action film.

Chances are the film will be made using the same technology as the Tintin Movie and Market Saw is reporting that it will be made in 3D.

Source: There’s A New Epic In Town: Spielberg Buys Rights To Manga “Ghost In The Shell” – Will Be Live Action 3D!!