Tintin Movie

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!!

Sorry about the deviation from Tintin and the Tintin Movie but I wanted to tell you about this beautiful, art deco X-Men.

By Eric Tan

Award winning, best selling author of the Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In typical style, Terry has decided to use his fame to draw attention to the low levels of funding for research into Alzheimer’s. He has given £500,000 ( $1,000,000 ) to research and has been round the TV and radio stations raising awareness of this terrible but often hidden disease.

In response, the millions of Discworld fans are coming together for Match It For Pratchett. A campaign to match Terry’s £500,000 with £500,000 raised from fans around the world. In just four days, £35,000 has been collected.

If you are a fan of the Discworld or want to help fight a disease which, in Terry’s words, “which strips away your living self a bit at a time” then please donate. There is a donation jar on the web site plus full details of how to give directly to various national charities.

P.s. I’m also the web master for Match It For Pratchett so their may be less updates around here for a while.

In most languages, Tintin’s name isn’t translated as Tintin works well in most situations. When it is translated, it tends to remain one word but a few languages it splits into two words. In Arabic and Vietnamese it is ‘Tin Tin’ and Japanese and Farsi its ‘Tan Tan’. However, judging from the traffic I get from Google, a lot people mistakenly spell Tintin as two words and end up looking for ‘Tin Tin Movie’ or ‘tin tin film’.

It’s very odd as Tintin is book so most people searching for it would be familiar with how its written. This is going to increase as the release of the film approaches. More people will only learn about Tintin via word of mouth or watching trailers online. So if you are one of those people who have come here looking for the ‘Tin Tin movie’ then welcome and have a good look around. But please remember, unless you looking for the Arabic or Vietnamese versions, its Tintin not Tin Tin.

Casting for the Tintin Movie has begun and we can be sure that The Secret of the Unicorn / Red Rackham’s Treasure will be the basis for one of the films at least. They are casting the Bird Brothers, Nestor, Sakharine (one of the people after the model ship), Aristides Silk (the pick pocket) and Red Rackham himself who are all in The Secret of the Unicorn. Mrs Finch (Tintin’s Landlady) and two kidnappers (presumably Allen & Ernie from the cast list) have a seen on page 35 of Secret of the Unicorn. Presumably Mr Crabtree is the market stall owner Tintin buy’s the ship from.

In the Crab With The Golden Claws, Mrs Finch makes an appearance plus there are Lt. Delacourt and Ahmed from the fort in Afghar (page 33). Omar Ben Salaad is the leader of the smugglers. The unnamed seaplane pilot & co-pilot are probably the ones who attack Tintin & Capt Haddock.

Some roles are new and not in the books. Barnaby (an American Interpol Inspector), Merrydew (a rival reporter) and Wetherbuck (Tintin’s Editor). Merrydew and Wetherbuck will possibly appear in multiple films so presumably they have been added to make Tintin’s world a bit more believable. Barnaby may be replacement for Bunji Kuraki, the Japanese police inspector who is kidnapped by the smugglers.

In The Crab With The Golden Claw, Tintin meets Captain Haddock for the first time and in The Secret of the Unicorn, the pair first meet Professor Calculus. By the end of Red Rackham’s Treasure, Captain Haddock owns Marlinspike Hall so this makes a nice development of characters across the films and nicely sets things up for any future films. It is still not clear if this is the cast and plot-lines for just the Jackson and Spielberg films or whether these will cover all three films.

Still, it looks like I was wrong about my predictions of which books would be made in to the films.

Ok, it isn’t actually Dr Who, its Steven Moffat who has written several of the best Dr Who episodes. This information comes from the news agency Reuters but its not clear how official it is.

Moffat is one of the best British TV script writers. His first show was BAFTA award winning Press Gang for which he wrote all 43 episodes. He then went on to write episodes of Murder Most Horrid as well as the series Joking Apart, Chalk and the award winning comedy Coupling. Jekyll, his retelling of the The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was on UK TV this summer. He is a lifelong Dr Who fan and has landed a dream job in writting two episodes in each series, two of which have won Hugo awards.

I cannot be happier with Steven Moffat as the writer of the Tintin Movies as Coupling is one of my all time favorite comedy shows. He is incredibly talented, capable of producing moving and action packed scripts. Most importantly for tackling Tintin is that he understands how to reinvent existing characters in a way that is new and exciting but is also sympathetic to the original material.

Association of Editorial Cartoonists

So someone noticed that Tintin in the Congo is racist.

Not bad, only seventy years after its publication the Commission for Racial Equality has commented on Tintin in the Congo. I expect to see a statement attacking the anti-Semitic nature of Mein Kampf soon. This is what the CRE had to say:

A hundred years ago it was common to see negative stereotypes of black people. Books contained images of ’savages’, and some white people considered black people to be intellectually and socially inferior.

Most people would assume that those days are behind us, and that we now live in a more accepting society. Yet here we are in 2007 with high street book shops selling ‘Tintin In The Congo’. This book contains imagery and words of hideous racial prejudice, where the ’savage natives’ look like monkeys and talk like imbeciles.

Whichever way you look at it, the content of this book is blatantly racist. High street shops, and indeed any shops, ought to think very carefully about whether they ought to be selling and displaying it.

Yes, it was written a long time ago, but this certainly does not make it acceptable. This is potentially highly offensive to a great number of people.

It beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable to sell and display ‘Tintin In The Congo.’

The only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying ‘old fashioned, racist claptrap’.

I’m a white middle class anglo-saxon so avoid commenting on race issues because I know nothing about them but here the CRE has gone for a mindless, knee-jerk reaction. A reaction that is as ill-conceived as Daily Mail readers harping on about ‘Political Correctness Gone Mad’ whenever the government clamps down on genuine racism. The CRE want to ban the book because ‘potentially highly offensive to a great number of people’. Of course we would not find anything else that might offend a great number of people in book stores, such as religious tracts or pornography.

The biggest mistake is that the Commission for Racial Equality are missing the uplifting, anti-racist story of Herge’s own life. Born and brought up in a society that saw all non-whites as being sub-human Herge at first reflected those beliefs in his early works like Tintin and the Congo. However Herge’s eyes were opened by his friendship with the artist Chang Chong-jen. Ever since Tintin and the Blue Lotus Herge worked hard to depict the non-white peoples in a positive light. Rather than making stupid remarks about Tintin and the Congo the CRE should celibrate the life of Herge as an example of how we can all change and become more accepting of others.

If you can get to Lausanne this weekend, you are in for a treat.

Lausanne’s Festival de la Cité honors the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hergé, the Belgian comic book writer, while offering a wide selection of free concerts and shows.


Le Festival de la Cité returns to the Vaud capital this summer with 200 free artistic events over nine days. Starting July 6 the festival’s attractions range from concerts and theatre to contemporary dance and street arts. To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Hergé, the late Belgian creator of Tintin comic books, organizers are presenting a special two-day Tintin festival on July 7-8.


Twelve original sketches of Tintin will be on display in Lausanne’s museum of history (musée historique de Lausanne). A dozen cars of the type that appear in Hergé’s works will be on display at Place de la Riponne, while the Atlantic movie theatre will screen animated films featuring several of Tintin’s adventures, such as “The Mystery of the Golden Fleece” and “The Crab with the Golden Claws.”

Hopefully in the run up to the Tintin Movie we will see a lot of these exhibitions touring around the world so we can all see them.