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Hated, Loathed, Despised The Adventures of Tin-Tin, even though it was mildly entertaining while I watched. People comparing it to Raiders of the Lost Ark because it's a globe-trotting adventure by Steven Spielberg need to be taken out and shot.
It actually succeeded in rendering motion-capture characters not unbelievably creepy for the first time. I accepted the leads as characters and particularly noticed their eyes were not dead. (I've often wondered why I can accept The Muppets as individual characters when they have literally dead eyes - in animation, lively eyes are the key to a character not seeming to be a zombie).
But almost everything else about the movie was wretched. The story was a fine Hardy Boys plot, but it was really just one mind-numbing action set-piece after another. All of them so overblown because of the "freedom" animation suddenly provided Spielberg (though hardly unknown to producer Peter Jackson) that they were stultifying and not exhilarating after the first two. One in particular was such a defiance of physical and human possibility that it made me cringe. This might not have happened if they'd kept the cartoon style of Herge's characters. But with photo-realistic characters of motion capture, this excess cartoonishness of action really bugged me.
Worst of all, the constant attempts at humor fell embarrassingly flat. This stuff might have been funny in 1929 when Tin Tin was minted, but it was awful and cringe-worthy in 2011.
Spielberg apparently fell in love with the camera-movement freedom animation provided him, and went absolutely batsh!t crazy with the flowing, moving, soaring, squeezing everywhere camera movement. Again, as with the overboard action choreography, what was at first fun soon became annoying and mindnumbing. The only sequence that worked for me was a flashback of the pirate treasure legend origin - simply because it was a memory being told, and the crazy stylization worked in that context.
Dumb, dumb, lame, stupid. With all the surprise greats in recent animation by various studios, this was really quite the dud by comparison.
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