Tintin Movie

A very quick link to the Tintin Puzzles blog. As well as a few spot-the-difference type puzzles, the site has Tintin sticker designs and bookmarks to download.

P.s. I’m off to spend a week camping in a field at Glastonbury so there won’t be any updates on Tintin Movie. Sod’s law says that they will make a big Tintin announcement on tomorrow, the moment I’m away from my computer. In the meantime you can keep an eye on Tintin related news via the Tintin RSS Feed that picks up any mention of Tintin in the news or on major blogs.

At the end of the year, Evans and his Italian wife, Chiara, hope to visit the Tibetan child they sponsor.

The trip should be less hazardous than the one taken by the person whose story inspired Evans’s passion for the country and its people, the fictitious Tintin created by the Belgian cartoonist Herge.

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Tintin became the first fictional recipient of the Dalai Lama’s Light of Truth award on June 1, 2006.

Evans says the story, first published in 1960, “got me interested and really aware of the Dalai Lama situation, and reading about Buddhism and so on. I respect [the Dalai Lama] a lot and feel he has been very unfairly treated.'’

Evans gears up for a free Tibet tour

Herge’s other comic creations, Quick & Flupke, have been launched in India.

“Even worse will be the Tintin Purists…” is a blog post looking at purists reactions to the Lord of the Rings films. Even if the Tintin Movie is as good an adaptation as Jackson’s LotR then a lot of Tintin fans will complain because their favourite bit has been cut. Personally, I’m going to take the films on their own merit and their general feel. If they are well made films, with good scripts and stick to the general tone of the books, then I will be a very happy Tintin fan.

From The Guardian:

In Tintin’s last-but-one-adventure, Flight 714, our intrepid boy reporter and his friends find themselves on a small and deserted Indonesian island. The first intimation that things may not quite be as they seem comes when a rather bemused-looking but undeniably giant lizard ambles out of the bushes.


“What on earth’s that?” exclaims Captain Haddock. “A monitor,” replies Tintin. “What’s it doing here, pestilential pachyderm?” demands Haddock, displaying his usual grasp of alliteration (and absence of scientific knowledge). “It looks like it’s escaped from the ice age!”

Into the dragon’s den

Think Belgium, think comics and you’ll think of Tintin. Try it again, and Belgium’s only other literary export springs to mind. Yes, its those annoyingly happy Smurfs. Like Tintin they are also going to get a live action / CGI film.

Source: Smurf Movie News

Not a lot happening on the Tintin Movie front at the moment. Filming due to start in September, cast not yet announced sums it all up. However, Tintin remains a cultural force, cropping up all over the place.

Bartholome Marquez, the new manager of the Espanyol football team has joined a long list of people, including politicians, to be nick-named Tintin: New adventure for Tintin

On the Tintinologist forum, Pharaoh spotted an interesting plot twist that was lost in the translation into English: Tintin in America: Bad News

Finally, blogger Jordan Hurder, explores his own fascination with Tintin and makes a few pointed observations.

4. In German, Tintin is called “Tim.” Why do they have to be so efficient?

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7. Tintin is supposed to live in the real world, yet he does things that are clearly impossible. In one adventure, he’s stranded in the jungle with only elephants as his company (elephants to whom he relates with polite detachment). To communicate with them, he picks up a tree branch and handily uses a pocketknife to carve it into a giant trumpet that he then uses to approximate the sound of elephant speech. (Aside from the impossibility of approximating elephant speech, there is also the obvious difficulty of hollowing out a 4-foot solid branch of wood using a two inch pocketknife.) The scene where he asks the elephant to spout water out of its trunk so he can shower under it has to be seen to be believed. Also, he showers in his boxers, presumably because Herge didn’t want to show nudity. But is there a bigger secret being hidden here? In another episode, he kills an ape, cuts off its head, and puts its skin on like a suit in order to blend in with the other apes. And it’s not supposed to be gross at all. Gross.

Source: Tintin, Your Flipped up Tuft of Hair is the Least Curious Thing About You

Is Tintin really going to use a that cat-o’nine tails on someone? More importantly, where did this scene, created by Herge and longtime Tintin illustrator Bob De Moor, appear? Only The Ephemerist has the answer

The Pompidou Centre in Paris has accepted a Tintin strip to be part of its permanent collection. The first comic strip to be included in the gallery.

An original black and white strip, signed by Tintin’s Belgian creator Herge and donated by his widow Fanny Rodwell, comes from the 1956 story, The Calculus Affair, the 18th of the Tintin adventures.



Pompidou contemporary art museum curator Benoit Peers said that the donation could lead the way for the acquisition of more comic strips.



“One can say that Herge remains a pioneer and that Tintin, once again, has shown the way.” he told Le Figaro.

From: Tintin enters Pompidou Centre’s modern art collection in Paris

This is the page in question, I believe, though in black & white and presumably in French.

Charles Burns, one of the most disturbing comic artists / illustrators has a portfolio of work out by United Dead Artists that includes this familiar image:


For comparison I thought I would put up the original image and I was amazed at how close Charles Burns’ version is to the original. Try comparing the locations of the rocks. I then noticed something about The Shooting Star. The cover is a redrawn version of one of the panels.

The Shooting Star Cover Art Work

Final Panel of Page 51

It makes sense for the artwork to be redrawn for the cover but my surprise is a naiveté left over from my childhood when I would look through the books finding the frame they had used for the cover. One more precious childhood memory destroyed by the bitter reality of adulthood.

VFX World have a long article on The Virtual Rebirth of Cinema examining the background an technology of films such a Beowulf and the Tintin Movies.

The dawn of a new “virtual filmmaking” age is upon us. Sparked by the pioneering work of Bob Zemeckis on The Polar Express and Beowulf and amped to the extreme to create a realtime director-centric workflow by James Cameron, Rob Legato and team for the upcoming Avatar, this new evolution of the filmmaking process is energizing the Hollywood industry. Having worked on a couple of these bleeding-edge film projects (Avatar, Tintin) with many of the industry’s’ leading filmmakers, artists and technicians has allowed me to witness and contribute to the development of this new virtual filmmaking system that will likely lead the moviemaking process over the coming decades. The virtual filmmaking process is an amalgamation of traditional filmmaking, CGI, visual effects pipelines, previs workflows and realtime computer gaming technology. Virtual filmmaking combines the best parts of all of these previous traditions in a unique way to create something immensely useful and creatively liberating for the director and other artistic team members. Although I can’t elaborate on the specifics of any one system, I’d like to briefly touch on the technological progression toward the virtual filmmaking revolution in general and point out some of the innovations of this new system.

Check out Gazpachot’s blog for surreal imagery including this Tintin / Titanic comparison.

Meanwhile, On Jon’s Random Acts of Geekery, he has a a guide to drawing Tintin.