Friday, November 25, 2011

Animated Cars Not of Pixar

The Times of New York discusses the automobiles in Tintin.

... The movie, like the book it is based on, takes its automobiles seriously, so the fleeing coupe ... is a faithfully recreated 1937 Ford V-8, animated to reflect the actual car as well as the unique style of the artist ....

“The version in the movie is actually quite referential to the physical car,” said Jamie Beard, the animation supervisor for the film, referring to the Ford featured in the trailer. “Hergé used a very specific two-door model, the trunk back, which is actually a slightly rarer model of the V-8 Tudor. The color that he used, the turquoise blue, is actually one of the standard V-8 colors, but he’s done his own Hergé spin on that and adjusted the colors ever so slightly.” ...

The Times also undercuts the "mo-cap isn't animation" meme:

... The widely anticipated movie, a 3-D animated feature with A-list credits — Steven Spielberg directed and Peter Jackson served as a producer — is to be released on Dec. 21. ...

If the New York Times says The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is an animated feature, who are we to say otherwise? Either way, I'm interested in seeing it, even if 89.7% of the American population has no idea who the Boy Reporter is.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've seen enough of the latest Tintin to know I'd rather watch this vintage French version (Haddock's beard aside, it looks far better) or this charming French stop-motion version.

And did Herge really slightly tweak the color of the Ford, or was that simply as close as they could get with comic book printing technology at the time?

In any event, I wish Spielberg and Jackson had focused on the dead eyes of the mo-cap characters instead of the authenticity of the cars.

Floyd Norman said...

If ever a feature deserved to be animated (traditional) it was this one. I was initially excited when I heard Spielberg was going to do Tintin. Once I learned this was another "puppet show" I lost all interest.

However, don't let me rain on your parade. If you like mo-cap, knock yourselves out.

Anonymous said...

Mocap and computer animation is the future. The days of hand drawn are over. Nobody is longing for it other than the people that once did it.

I knew the old maestro and he would've greeted it with open arms and utilized the technology.

Anonymous said...

^^ Hey, Mr. or Ms. Pessimistic?

I never "did" hand drawn animation and I am not only longing for its return, but am also dreaming of the despise of mo-cap. Sure, Walt would have accepted CG because he was always innovative. But I like REAL cartoons, not detailed-enriched, dead-eyed manikins in which filmmakers spend more time making the hair and chrome car shines more than actual stories.

Anonymous said...

Please don't lump CG and mocap into the same category, thanks.

Anonymous said...

a great website about Tintin's cars - http://dardel.info/tintin/indexE.html

I'm pretty sure I got my lifelong love for vintage cars from tintin comics

I'd love for someone to stop bickering and dissect the art of Herge as storyboards

Anonymous said...

--> "In any event, I wish Spielberg and Jackson had focused on the dead eyes of the mo-cap characters instead of the authenticity of the cars."


Interesting to me that some film characters have very convincing eyes, for example, Kreacher the elf in Harry Potter (overly backlit Sculpey-like skin, notwithstanding). It's OK to dial-down the subsurface scattering, we get it, one of your programmers finally implemented it, now relax a little bit.

The CG Flynn in Tron Legacy was one of the worst recent examples. But then again, it's DD, so it's going to look crappy.

Anonymous said...

Yeah, Kreacher was better than most, but even he still resides in the uncanny valley.

What amazes me is that with almost all mo-cap characters, they can't even get something basic like eye direction right. It's disturbing never being sure where a character is looking, or seeing their eyes looking in slightly different directions, or never seeing convincing convergence as they look at something close up.

Mesterius said...

"If ever a feature deserved to be animated (traditional) it was this one. I was initially excited when I heard Spielberg was going to do Tintin. Once I learned this was another "puppet show" I lost all interest.

However, don't let me rain on your parade. If you like mo-cap, knock yourselves out."

Floyd, while I agree that the best thing would definitely be to see Tintin as a hand-drawn animated feature, I'll still recommend giving mo-cap Tintin a chance. Yes, seeing the characters with pupils in their eyes is jarring; and yes, the character designs are not always as faithful as they could have been (the Thom(p)sons are a little too fat, for one thing), but much of the movie is still a fun ride, and the caricatured sense of Hergé world makes the mo-cap work noticeably better, I think, than what I've seen recently of Robert Zemeckis' work. It's not perfect, but watching the movie I gradually got used to it.

Talking about the film itself, it starts out pretty faithful to Hergé's storylines, but in the last few acts tweaks the story a lot, adding whole new scenes not to be found in Hergé's books. I generally preferred the scenes which stayed closest to the books, and it did feel like a few of the new scenes were designed both for the film and the accompanying video game simultaneously. Still - I managed to enjoy a lot of the film, and one can feel that Spielberg and Jackson are actually Tintin fans themselves.

Anonymous said...

"Mocap and computer animation is the future. The days of hand drawn are over. Nobody is longing for it other than the people that once did it.

I knew the old maestro and he would've greeted it with open arms and utilized the technology."

Oh, thank you! Thank you, oh wise one! Please shower us more with your pronouncements of the future!
You are obviously a person of vision and insight, blessing this blog with your genius! Please, please, tell us more, you great man! Shower us with your wisdom, your bold statements from cyberspace! Oh, please reveal yourself, oh blessed chosen one! What wise sage are you that sits behind that keyboard, punching out glorious insights of the world of which none of us could even imagine? What luck that we should all be the recipients of your intelligence! Oh! Oh! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

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