Paramount and Sony have sorted out their release plans for The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn. It will be released internationally first, in late October and early November 2011 before reaching the United States on December 23rd. Steven Spielberg directed the 3D performance capture sessions while Peter Jackson’s overseeing the post production at his WETA studios. Both are producing along with Kathleen Kennedy. Jamie Bell stars as Tintin while Daniel Craig portrays the villain, Red Rackham. Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Gad Elmaleh, Toby Jones and Mackenzie Crook round out the supporting cast. The script was written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish, so that’s a plus. The idea is for three films to eventually be made, with Peter Jackson directing the second and either Jackson, Spielberg, both or someone else entirely to direct the third.
Personally I’m inclined to say that motion capture sucks and I have absolutely no idea why you wouldn’t just develop this as a strictly animated feature, but we’ll see. It’s hard to condemn this one without at least a glimpse of the art style they’re going for. I’ve yet to be even remotely impressed by any film entirely done using performance capture (namely the Robert Zemeckis films of the last decade). It’s worked fairly well on certain characters in live-action films though, like Gollum. It’ll be a long waiting game to see if this turns out to be a creatively beneficial technique.
