Trailer
Plot summary
Reporter Tintin browses a Brussels market with his dog Snowy and buys a model of the ship Unicorn. The ship collector Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine and an Interpol officer both try to buy it from him, without success. At Tintin's apartment the model breaks and a parchment scroll slips out. The model is gone when Tintin returns from the Maritime Library, so he goes to Marlinspike Hall and accuses Sakharine of the theft. Snowy shows him the scroll. Tintin is then abducted by Sakharine's men and held aboard the cargo ship Karaboudjan, where he meets its captain, Archibald Haddock, who is permanently drunk and knows little about his own past.
Cast
Show all 20 cast
- Kim Stengelas Bianca Castafiore (voice)
- Abraham Justiceas Soldier (voice)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Adventures of Tintin (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The admiration ran both ways. Herge thought Steven Spielberg was the only person who could ever do Tintin justice, and Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy were due to meet him in 1983 while shooting Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in London. Herge died that week, and his widow granted the rights anyway.
- The 1980s version would have been very different. Spielberg hired E.T. writer Melissa Mathison to script a story about Tintin fighting ivory hunters in Africa, saw the character as an "Indiana Jones for kids", and wanted Jack Nicholson as Captain Haddock.
- A week of test filming in November 2006 took place in Playa Vista, Los Angeles, on the stage where James Cameron shot Avatar, with Peter Jackson standing in for Tintin while Cameron and Robert Zemeckis watched. Weta Digital turned it into a 20-minute photorealistic reel.
- A month before cameras were due to roll, Universal dropped out, citing weak takings for motion-capture films like Monster House and Beowulf and a request from Spielberg and Jackson for 30 per cent of the gross. Paramount had already spent $30 million on pre-production.
- Cary Elwes talked his way into the film in a supermarket. He came across Spielberg in the cereal aisle, pressed his case as a huge Tintin fan, and was cast as one of the French seaplane pilots, the last parts still to be filled.
- To light interiors convincingly, Weta Digital and NVIDIA built a ray tracing program called PantaRay, which needs between 100 and 1,000 times the computation of the usual shadow-map methods.
- Animators said Snowy was the hardest character to build, because of his coat and because he is white. Property master Brad Elliott handled models as reference on set, a dog's movement was captured digitally, and the terrier's voice came from several breeds.
- It became the first all-digital motion-captured animated film, and the first non-Pixar film of any kind, to win the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature Film.
