The Adventures of Tin Tin Review

The Adventures of Tin Tin is a breath of fresh air for both a genre and Steven Spielberg’s career. In a genre of low brow, cheeky, dumb action films that don’t do justice for a genre that once harbored the legends like Indiana Jones (Also by Spielberg) Tin Tin creates a new form of smart, fun entertainment that both movie going audience and critics can rejoice in seeing as it makes for a fun, thrilling ride. And as for Spielberg who hasn’t had a new hit of fresh style since Catch Me If You Can (2002), here, he has created a film that both celebrates the youth of Spielberg but the adventurous tone he once had when doing his Indiana Jones films. It’s about time Spielberg has caught us by surprise with a film that reminds us why Spielberg is celebrated for his innovation.

We begin with young, journalistic explorer; Tin Tin, who buys a model of ship of the Unicorn from a merchant, but soon gets tangled with a collector of ships and starts to unravel a mystery that surrounds a myth of the Unicorn ship and it’s treasures that people are invested to find at all costs. While the plot is simplistic enough for a children’s animated film, it’s what Spielberg does with the genre that makes the film more enthralling than it seems to be. He utilizes the animation to full extent creating unique and unforeseen worlds we wouldn’t have imagined in a live action film and furthermore, it showcases how inventive Spielberg can be with the camera in a digital world than in a real world. There are amazing camera angles and tracking shots that remind us the classic Spielberg we’ve seen in his past films from the 80’s and it makes Spielberg bring the audience for a ride unlike anything we’ve seen from him.

Motion capture has been now getting more attention as with Avatar and The Rise of the Planet of the Apes showcasing the performances actors can give and create new, fully dimensional characters that in most live action films we can never see or get. It gives a new persona for actors to try new and experiment with a digital world and use their performances to showcase their brilliant talents. Jamie Bell as Tin Tin is wonderful! He reminds us of what we can relate to as a young Indiana Jones as that must’ve been Spielberg’s intention for the film to be a throwback to his old adventure films. Bell embodies the types of qualities we like to see in a young adventurer that it makes him all the more fascinating. The main standout performances however, is Andy Serkis as the overbearing, drunk Captain Haddock and Daniel Craig as the sinister, antagonist Ivan. Serkis is already a natural as a performance capture actor as he has created cinema’s most memorable animated characters like Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy and Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and he does just a good enough job in this role. But Daniel Craig who is mostly known, as the new James Bond is almost unrecognizable in both appearance and his accent as he creates another character that one wouldn’t think of James Bond. He plays a sinister, greedy and evil person right down to his core and makes him all the more menacing.
The rest of the cast is fine as they don’t upstage the main performers and do just what they are intended to do within their characters.

It’s hard to try and critique a film like Tin Tin without thinking of Indiana Jones. It’s almost believable that Spielberg would use a property like this to showcase his love for adventure films and it shows how it has elements from Spielberg’s films. Even the score from composer John Williams has a theme that harkens back to the fun, quirky adventure theme that once occupied the Indiana Jones series. It makes the adventure more vigorous than it already looks. There honestly is nothing to nit-pick about the implausibility of the animated world compared to the real life world like two cranes fighting each other or a motorcycle chase through the streets of Bagghar. But when is it appropriate to label a world’s physics to another when concerning the films context? It is meant to be both an animated film which should eliminate it being plausible and it’s an adventure film which given to it’s credit, deserves the right to be as imaginative as it can get as long as it doesn’t overshadow the characters. This is one of the best animated films I’ve seen in while in that it’s animation is seamless in both the design of the characters and it’s world and it brings up the point of motion capture animation becoming the new breed of entertainment.

A by Amritpal Rai