Movie Review: "The Adventures of Tintin"

One of the last animated films to be released last year, "The Adventures of Tintin" is Spielberg's take on a classic comic strip. The story features a young news reporter, Tintin, and his dog, Snowy, as they are tossed into an adventure involving pirates, sunken treasure, and the search for three lost scrolls. The film is filmed in motion-capture style, which to me is not the ideal for animation. It looks nice at certain points, especially the environment, but the characters themselves are halfway between animation and real life. To me, it's too jarringly unrealistic while trying to be realistic. That being said, it actually did look nice, and the story itself was so captivating that it made up for any issues I personally had with the animation style. It was a really interesting story, a mystery, and the characters themselves were quite intriguing. The best were the supporting characters of Thompson and Thompson, who provided a good deal of comic relief. John Williams's score was typical style for him, and certain parts were reminiscent of both "Indiana Jones" and the space battle above the moon of Endor from "Return of the Jedi." This film was overlooked by the academy, I feel; instead, they went with relative nonsense like "Kung Fu Panda 2." To me, this was definitely a well-done and exciting work of animation, and helped introduce me to a classic character I knew very little about beforehand.