The Adventures of Tintin / Les Aventures de Tintin : Le Secret de la Licorne (Bilingual) [Blu-ray + DVD + Digital]

VIDEO:

The Adventures Of Tintin arrives at blu ray with AVC MPEG-4 1080p 2.35:1 encode. This is a beautiful and colourful film. Daytime exteriors - ranging from Parisian markets to planes taking off over green oceans to infinite sand dunes to seaside villages - look exquisite. Colours and textures pop, with the imagery constantly flirting between highly detailed computer animation and photo-realism. Nighttime sequences are equally strong, held tight by rich, exemplary black levels and glistening reflections. (4.5/5)

AUDIO:

This DTS HD Master Audio 7.1 lossless track is the only way to enjoy the modern action movie, with tremendous dynamic range. Dialogue is clearly defined. As a 7.1 experience, bullets ping and swirl in all channels, and the sound design really pulls you forward into the world by placing a number of nice effects, such as the airplane propeller, directly behind your ears. In my 9 Wilson Audio WATT/Puppies speakers home theatre system, this 7.1 track really immerses the audience in the midst of the action. (5/5)

TRIVIA AND GOOFS:

This picture was nominated for Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score by John Williams, but lost to Ludovic Bource's The Artist. Personally, I was hoping that Hugo would win.

It has an estimated budge of $130 million, but worldwide gross so far is $369 million!

This is the first animated film directed by Steven Spielberg.

Originally, Steven Spielberg was going to do a live-action adaptation of Tintin, and called Peter Jackson to ask if his VFX company Weta Digital would work on the film, in particular creating a CGI Snowy. Jackson, as it turned out, was a longtime fan of Tintin, and convinced Spielberg that live action would not do justice to the comic books, and that motion capture was the best way of representing Hergé's world of Tintin. However, Snowy would still be CGI.

The seaplane is marked CN-3411 and Tintin says that the plane is the Portuguese Markings, but the code CN-3411 are the Moroccan Markings.

Allen orders his mate to bring TNT and the mate returns with dynamite. Dynamite contains no TNT, but is actually stabilized nitroglycerin.

After Tintin hijacks the seaplane, when paging through the flight manual, he comes across a page diagramming "your dashboard". In an aircraft it is called an instrument panel, never a dashboard.

This is Andy Serkis's third collaboration with Peter Jackson, as well as his fourth motion-capture role (he had earlier played the creatures Gollum and King Kong in features directed by Jackson and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Sometime after being cast, Serkis joked that he was worried Peter Jackson would cast him as Tintin's dog Snowy.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

The Adventures of Tintin is a fun, energetic adventure film that harkens back to the Saturday morning serials which inspired Spielberg's 'Raiders of the Lost Arc' (even though Tintin wasn't actually one of those inspirations). (By the way, the Indiana Jones trilogy on blu ray will be coming out later this year!) While not perfect, the film is a return to form for the director and features stunning, jaw-dropping filmmaking. However, because motion capture was used to animate the characters, some viewers may have trouble emotionally connecting with the material. I personally enjoyed the movie, with its crisp and detailed video and spectacular sound of John Williams. The additional bonus is that there is a $3 off mail-in coupon on the front of the disc that you can send to an address in Pickering, Ontario. This is in addition to the $5 off that I got from Amazon.ca at the time of purchase. The final cost is $16.99!!! Amazing value for this combo of blu ray disc, DVD plus Digital Copy. Highly recommended. I hope this review is helpful to you.

The world of animation has made enormous leaps and bounds in the last several decades with such epic productions as the "The Lion Tamer", "Avatar", and "Lord of the Rings". The secret of success has to be the advances the industry has made in such digital techniques as facial modelling, blue screening and key framing. This year's seminal production, according to the Academy, is another masterpiece of high artistic quality called "Tintin", a digital animation interpretation of Belgium cartoonist Herge's series covering the life of a young crime reporter in search of another adventure. The story is true to the original cartoon both in excellent type casting and voice-over for the main characters; people like the scrupulous and resourceful Tintin, the ever-crapulous Captain Haddock and the less-than-dangerous detective duo of Thomson and Thomson hot in pursuit of pick-pockets seem to contain a life-like verve as they plunge headlong into a world full of danger, unending intrigue and moments of humorous folly. I felt at home with this version of events; it effectively allowed me to feel like I was really in the middle of a speeded-up, come-to-life rendition of an old comic legend, and isn't that what good animation is all about. All or most of the detail is clear, the storyline is easy to follow, and the imagination is fully engaged as to all the spills and thrills that are about to take place.

I personally loved the story, which is rare enough in this day and age, but the attention to detail in the CG and the visual effects really put this movie over the top. I enjoyed it on my 3D TV and I found they did a great job using incorporating 3D into the movie without it being in your face the entire time. It's Action packed and great fun for the whole family (as long as you don't mind some drinking and period correct smoking). Also, as a person fluent in french, I enjoyed watching it in the classic cartoons native language.