Everybody else stop making movies now, because your competitions just too steep. Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, the two biggest men in movies right now, have announced that they are to team up to make a trilogy of Tintin movies. And this isn't one of those 'one's producing, one's directing' things. Both will be making at least one film, with a director for the third still to be chosen. Regular readers will know that if it's announced as George Lucas we'd explode at the very Empireness of it all, and we make no apologies for that.
Spielberg has been trying to secure the rights to (read the following in a big boomy voice) Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin for the past 25 years and it’s only in the past year that all the threads have been tied up. Spielberg, Jackson and Dreamworks have been quietly developing the project over the past twelve months, selecting three adventures from the comic book series about a boy detective and his little fluffy dog Snowy, and Jackson’s WETA Digital has created a 20-minute test reel for the movies. The plan is to make the movie’s 3D digital animation, rather that live-action. But Jackson doesn’t plan to make them simply sticky-out versions of the comic book characters.
“We’re making them look photorealistic,” he says. “The fibres of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people – but real Hergé people”.
“Herge’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and soul which goes beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer animated characters,” adds Spielberg. “We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honour the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created”.
Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ll be over here wetting ourselves.