Painting with Pixels: Spielberg’s Tintin
“Animation is the father of cinema. [Animators] have to have in their mind a clear picture of how a chipmunk rolls over in the snow. They’ve got to know what each side of that chipmunk looks like…They have to use their imagination and paint these things twelve cells a second and [understand] how the fur moves and how the wind’s blowing…That’s why I think all directors should be animators first.”
Steven Spielberg, 1978
“I just adored it. It made me more like a painter than ever before.”
Steven Spielberg, 2011
Ever since the start of his career, Steven Spielberg has had an affinity for animation. Along with the Disney references in 1941 (1979) (to Dumbo (1941)) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) (both to Pinocchio (1940)), he’s also worked as executive producer on films like An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988). It always seemed like a case of ‘when’ and not ‘if’ he would direct an animated film of his own, and in 2011 he finally did, using motion-capture technology to realise his long-gestating adaptation of Herge’s beloved comic book adventurer Tintin in The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
The film produced a mixed response. Some critics found the technology too rubbery and lifeless to truly convince, some hit out at the episodic script from British writers Steven Moffat (Doctor Who), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block), while others expressed concerns over the film’s perceived emptiness. One was Joseph McBride, author of the unofficial Spielberg bio, Steven Spielberg: A Biography. Writing in February of 2012 on San Francisco State University’s Department of Cinema blog, McBride made passing reference to Tintin, arguing that the film proves that “sometimes…Spielberg’s hyperkineticism can spin out of control, resulting in a film that seems like a perpetual motion machine, afraid to pause for reflection and ultimately enervating.”
McBride is right; Tintin is certainly hyperkinetic and it rarely pauses to catch its breath. But it does reflect — sometimes literally, in fact. Tintin is quintessential Spielberg, the director of some of the most exclusively pictorial cinematic moments in film history using the limitless possibilities of motion-capture technology to distil his thematic concerns into a visual feast. Studying the film gives a great insight into Spielberg’s process for doing this and the issues he’s explored across his career, while also shining a light on why he has come to dominate the cinematic artform so completely. This piece will look closely at Tintin and analyse Spielberg’s use of his core visual motifs — light, reflection and the idea of seeing — and how they reflect three of his key themes — emotional development, heritage and community.
Let there be light
“Light,” Steven Spielberg has said, “is life.” In his cinema, the director has repeatedly proven this, most notably marking the creation of the life-saving document of Schindler’s List (1993) with a celestial beam of light, but it was in his childhood years that he learned this simple mantra. Two key incidents shaped the budding director’s most well-known visual motif. The first came when he was taken to a synagogue in his hometown of Cincinnati at the age of six months. Pushed down the aisles of the intimidating structure in his pram, he was greeted at its end by the Torah Ark, a holy area containing the synagogue’s Torah scrolls, which emanated a beautiful red glow. The boy was enchanted. Several years later, Spielberg experienced a similar blend of fear and wonder when his father Arnold woke him in the middle of the night to witness a meteor shower. Again the boy was presented with mysterious darkness punctured by comforting points of light, and again he was transfixed.
Spielberg’s infatuation with light would manifest itself in his very first feature film, Firelight (a Close Encounters prototype in which glowing alien orbs descend on Earth), and dominate the final frames of his first two professional films, Duel (1971) and The Sugarland Express (1974). Both movies close with shots of characters bathed in warm orange sunlight, but they represent very different things. In Duel, our henpecked hero David Mann (Dennis Weaver) has defeated the truck and proven his masculinity, so the warm, orange glow he is surrounded in during the final shot represents his new dawn. Conversely, the same warm, orange glow in The Sugarland Express represents a more melancholic mood. The character bathed in light this time is kidnapped cop Maxwell Slide (Michael Sacks). He was held hostage by Clovis and Lou-Jean Poplin (William Atherton and Goldie Hawn), a couple desperate to reclaim their son from his adopted home, and while their mission is a success, it comes at the cost of Clovis’s life. Slide stands alone against the orange, considering the events he’s just played a part in, and the uncertain future ahead. With only an irresponsible mother to bring him up, what kind of a life does the Poplin child have ahead of him?
Though they may be separated by tone, these two scenes are connected by their common aim; in both, Spielberg is conveying his characters’ emotional realisations through light. This continued, with divine undertones, in Close Encounters (in which Roy Neary travels to a new life beyond the stars in the dazzling finale) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) (in which Indiana Jones’s path to the Well of the Souls is illuminated by a beam of piercing light). Spielberg’s early use of light was simple then, but things would change in E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982), in which Spielberg underpins two moments of fantasy (both the flying bike scenes) with elemental orbs of light — the moon and the sun. In the first, moonlit, flight, Elliott’s relationship with E.T. is at its peak — the two have bonded telepathically, and Elliott’s loneliness is ended; he’s finally found a friend.
Their connection, however, is a fantasy that can’t last long. Reality soon invades and Elliott and E.T. take flight again, this time against a roaring orange sun with Elliott’s friends in tow. The difference in light, and Spielberg’s camerawork, is vital in understanding the subtle, but significant, shift that Spielberg engineered in E.T.. The blue-black of the moonlight scene speaks of comfort, nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and the camerawork frames the scene as such — the cow jumped over the moon? So did E.T. and Elliott. The sunlit flight, however, features more dynamic camerawork. The pair don’t just fly across the sun, they fly into it as if they’re flying into their destiny, finally controlling their own lives. The scene recalls both the triumph of Duel and the melancholy of The Sugarland Express. It’s an escape and a last hurrah. Elliott knows that E.T. can’t survive on Earth and that he has to let him go. The boy has matured; so had Spielberg.
Other complex uses of light would follow. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) uses red and white light to denote danger and safety, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) draws on and undermines the Western with its closing use of a striking sunset, and Always (1989) echoes E.T. in its use of orange and blue-black, though it’s much more damning towards its hero, irresponsible aerial firefighter Pete (Richard Dreyfuss). Perhaps the zenith of Spielberg’s developing use of light came in Empire of the Sun (1987), his overlooked masterpiece about a young boy called Jim (Christian Bale), who struggles to survive in a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. In one scene, Jim watches a Japanese plane take off, the craft soaring across the face of the sun before being attacked by an American plane, creating two orbs of orange fire — the one born of violence and hatred corrupting the purity of the other, natural, one. Light, so vital for Elliott and E.T., is stripped of all its hopeful power in Empire of the Sun.
Spielberg would switch between ‘pure’ and ‘corrupted’ visions of light during the 90s and into the new Millennium, and while Tintin falls very much in the pure category, that doesn’t mean the film’s use of light doesn’t warrant exploration. Light in Tintin is used almost exclusively to emphasise the character arc of Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), a shaggy seadog who we meet as a down-and-out drunkard trapped in a cabin on his ship, the Karaboudjan, which has been commandeered by the villainous Sakharine (Daniel Craig). His journey is pure Spielberg — emotional denial to realisation — as he slowly comes to shake off the shackles of his alcoholism and embrace his past, in the shape of his legendary ancestor Sir Francis Haddock (Serkis again), his ship (the eponymous Unicorn) and its long lost treasure.
Of course, Tintin (Jamie Bell) is on hand to help the Captain find the treasure, but the first task is to escape the Karaboudjan, a difficult prospect, not just because of Sakharine’s men, but also Haddock’s self-destructive tendencies. When planning their escape, Haddock is keen to ensure that he and his new companion have everything they need to complete their mission, and leads Tintin on a dangerous chase through the ship to locate the keys to a cupboard. Inside lies not weapons or supplies, however, but whiskey. Shooting from inside the stock room, Spielberg directly links Haddock’s alcoholism to light by illuminating the scene with a piercing white light. To shed his alcoholism and step into the kind of emotional transcendence Spielbergian heroes strive for, Haddock must shake off this light and embrace something purer, something more real.
It isn’t easy though. Assisted by the limitless possibilities of digital animation, Spielberg fills Tintin and Haddock’s escape with harsh artificial light as the ship’s crew shine the searchlights looking for them. Spielberg shows us a handful of crewmen taking up their positions, disorientates us with streams of light that cut across the frame and, in one memorable instance, shines a spotlight directly into camera. When Tintin and Haddock finally escape the ship into a lifeboat, Spielberg uses wide shots, taken from the boat, with the ship in the background, its searchlights piercing the night sky. Emotionally, Haddock is engaged in a war, and light is both his tormentor and his potential salvation.
Sneaking away from the ship, Haddock and Tintin once again find themselves in a location dominated by light. Their lifeboat is stranded in the middle of the ocean; night has given way to dawn and the sun is slowly emerging on the horizon. The sky is a pale blue-black like it was in the night-time Karaboudjan scenes, the clouds suffused with a pale reddish-pinkish-orange created by the rising sun. Commanding a greater control over his environments than ever before, Spielberg has crafted a sort of purgatory for Haddock, a lost netherworld in which different tones of light play against one another, some beckoning him toward a better life, some attempting to drag him back into his old life. For now at least, the Captain will remain on the wrong side of the light, with Spielberg framing him primarily against the darkness.
Soon, however, the fates intervene, and when Haddock and Tintin take control of (and crash) a plane, they find themselves in the middle of the Sahara. With no drink (alcoholic or otherwise), Haddock is trapped in “the land of thirst”, and slowly starts sobering up; his emotional realisation has begun. Spielberg opens this scene by panning down to the desert from a shot of the sun. The effect is similar to the down-the-barrel-of-the-camera shot with the Karaboudjan’s searchlight, but this light’s natural origins mark it out from the spotlights, and give Haddock something to strive towards. His salvation is at hand — he just needs to earn it, which he does by finally remembering Sir Francis’s story and unlocking crucial clues in the hunt for the Unicorn.
Eventually, Haddock and Tintin find their way to a final showdown with Sakharine, who is also on the hunt for the treasure, at a dock. Here, Haddock’s sobriety is tested for the final time, and the piercing artificial light that dominated the Karaboudjan returns. It fills the background of almost every Haddock-centric shot, supplies the spotlight for his fight with Sakharine, and, in one of the film’s most beautiful images, isolates him as a lone bottle of Whiskey rolls his way. Prone on the floor, his hand lingering over the bottle, Haddock’s will is tested and his body consumed entirely by white light. Haddock rejects the light, however, and once Sakharine has been defeated, he and Tintin can finally put all the three scrolls they have been looking for together to produce co-ordinates for the lost Haddock treasure. Spielberg uses a POV shot to put us in Tintin’s position as he holds the scrolls up to a warm orange sun. The pair are almost at their goal, and Spielberg’s light has led them there.
There is, however, one final twist. The co-ordinates don’t lead to the ocean, where the ‘sunken’ treasure was thought to rest, but to Marlinspike Hall, Haddock’s family home currently under the ownership of Sakharine. When Tintin had visited the building earlier, Spielberg had employed hard, blue shafts of light to reflect the disrepair that it had fallen into. Now, with the rightful owner re-installed, the light is softer and more inviting. Haddock and Tintin pass through the halls, eventually finding a hidden room in which a globe, containing a portion of the Haddock loot, lies. Spielberg uses another tone of coloured light here, a hollow golden hue, the like of which was present in an earlier flashback scene featuring Sir Francis Haddock. This is treasure, but it’s not the treasure, and Haddock quickly loses interest in its shimmering emptiness and turns his attention to Sir Francis’s hat, which is also entombed in the room. He places the hat on his head, confirming his assent to his ancestor’s position, and finally completes his journey. Spielberg’s camera turns slowly around the Captain at a low angle. Sunlight streams through a crack in the boarded-up window, bathing him in light he’s been searching for all along.
Archibald Haddock is home.
Mirror, Mirror
Unsurprisingly for a man who spends his days behind a camera, Spielberg is interested in the way we process images in real and cinematic life. Like light, this too connects back to Spielberg’s youth, though the budding director’s initial experience with imagery was somewhat less wondrous. The Rosetta Stone moment was the boy’s first trip to the cinema, his father taking him to see Cecil B. DeMille’s circus spectacular The Greatest Show On Earth (1952). Spielberg, however, didn’t know he was going to see a movie — he thought he’d be visiting a real circus. What he got instead was an imitation that left him bitterly disappointed. A handful of elements impressed (James Stewart’s performance as a clown, the train crash), but everything else felt fake, hollow celluloid that he was alienated from, rather than a part of.
So much of Spielberg’s later career would focus on breaking down the “white canvas” of the cinema screen and drawing the audience into the film. As critic Frederick Wasser has explained, canny use of point of view (in Jaws and E.T.) and hand-held camerawork (in Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan (1998)) are key techniques Spielberg uses to achieve this, but he also likes to draw attention to the falseness of his films and asks his audience to consider the barrier between themselves and the action on screen. Duel, for example, opens with a shot of Mann gazing into a mirror — an eye, reflected in a mirror, onto a screen, where it’s consumed by a room full of other eyes. Later in the film, Mann experiences a paranoid episode in a diner, as he examines the room frantically trying to work out which of his fellow patrons is the owner of the truck that’s been chasing him. As he does so, Spielberg’s camera surveys the room as well, forcing us into Mann’s paranoid world. The director would perform a similar trick a few years later during Jaws‘s famous Kintner boy death sequence. By doing this, Spielberg succeeds in both his goals — the audience feels a part of the film, but they are also questioning the visuals they are being presented with. What is real? Are these men paranoid, or is there genuine danger lurking?
If Spielberg’s next two films, Close Encounters and 1941, offered the audience the simple pleasures of viewing, Raiders of the Lost Ark — his self-described “rehabilitation” after 1941‘s dire critical performance — turned the idea on its head by having Indy survive the Ark only because he knows not to look at the spectacular wonders that emerge from it. This climactic scene takes place on a secret island kitted out with cameras and lights. Centre stage are our three primary villains dressed in ceremonial garb. They’re actors in costume, and the island is a film set. In Raiders, Spielberg subtly suggests cinema, and then asks his audience to question it, an idea he’d repeat in Empire of the Sun and his two Jurassic Park films. Most recently, Minority Report (2002), which opens with a bravura scene in which Tom Cruise’s cop John Anderton assesses the location and perpetrator of a future crime as if he’s directing a movie scene, continued the trend.
With its revolutionary digital animation and kinetic action sequences, Tintin is one of Spielberg’s most boisterous films. On the surface, it seems like the black sheep of the director’s 2010s output, sandwiched as it is between two historical epics (War Horse (2011) and Lincoln (2012)). It is, however, bound to those films in its presentation of the image. War Horse references Gone With The Wind (1939) to tie the history of the motion picture to the history of the world, while Lincoln uses a collection of glass plates depicting slaves analysed by young Tad to emphasise the importance of imagery as a tool for social reform. Tintin‘s goal is less grand. Here Spielberg uses imagery, and more specifically, reflection, to emphasise identity; Tintin’s strong sense of it, and Haddock’s total lack of it.
Linking back to Duel, Spielberg introduces his main character through visual signifiers, first a painting, then a mirror — or rather, several mirrors. Perusing the goods at a local flea market, Tintin wanders past a series of antique mirrors, Spielberg capturing his hero’s iconic quiff as it moves from one to the next. The angle, shape and size of each mirror is different, so Tintin’s defining feature changes a little, but the vision remains, quite defiantly, the icon we’ve come to know and love; even when he tries to pat the quiff down, it springs quickly back into position. This is Tintin, the irrepressible boy reporter with the equally defiant haircut.
Spielberg introduces Haddock through reflection too, but the clarity of Tintin’s introduction is missing. When we first meet Haddock on the Karaboudjan, his head is resting on a table after another heavy drinking session. Spielberg tilts his camera at a Dutch angle, contrasting sharply with the clean, level shot he used for Tintin. Our view of the Captain is obscured by a bottle, its curvature warping Haddock into a monster with a mess of matted hair, tiny, squinting eyes and a gigantic nose. It’s a shot that could have been captured in live action, of course, but Spielberg uses digital animation to turn it into a painting of depth, detail and substance. Haddock isn’t just reflected through the bottle; he’s trapped in it.
As we’ve already explored, Haddock changes significantly during the film, and Spielberg offers final confirmation of his journey not through dialogue, but visuals and reflection. Having conquered his addiction, Haddock once again finds himself clutching a bottle of whiskey. The bottle is set in the foreground of the shot, Haddock sitting in the background. However, character and prop are now separated, and Spielberg shoots the scene at a slight low angle, the camera looking up at Haddock as he glares with determination at Sakharine. Light shines over Haddock’s shoulder, and onto the off-camera Sakharine, whose head and shoulders reflect into the bottle. The tables have turned, and now it’s the villain who finds himself trapped. Haddock’s rehabilitation is complete.
Characters aren’t the only things driving Spielberg’s smart use of reflection and seeing in Tintin, though. In one of the film’s most thrilling sequences, Spielberg uses reflection and signifiers of sight to craft a scene of suspense that draws the audience into the film, while at the same time keeping them separate from it. The scene comes at the Bagghar palace of Omar Ben Salaad (Gad Elmaleh), a Sheik who is in possession of the third and final Unicorn scroll. A small audience is in attendance, and they are joined by Tintin, Haddock and Sakharine, who is using opera singer Bianca Castafiore to get close to Salaad and the third Unicorn replica, which is in his possession and protected by a glass case. All are watching events through binoculars; like in Raiders, we’re an audience watching an audience watch.
Here, Spielberg asks for critical appraisal of the scene, using digital animation to fill the frame with details and layer in clues as to what Sakharine’s plan is, all while building suspense that he’ll later pay off. The sequence is split between three points of focus: Tintin and Haddock, Sakharine, and Ben Salaad. Haddock is appalled by Castafiore’s singing, and makes a not especially subtle exit as Tintin attempts to maintain a sense of decorum. Salaad sits at the front of the crowd, enraptured by Castafiore, who reflects, in perfect focus, in his spectacles. Sakharine, meanwhile, stands above the crowd in a balcony, peering over his glasses, in which Castafiore is also reflected, though this time the image is blurred. Salaad is obsessed by this woman, blinded by her to Sakharine’s true intent, just as everyone else is, just as we could be. But by shielding Sakharine from her spell, by keeping his eyes clear and her image out of focus, Spielberg warns us of the dangers of uncritical spectatorship. What, he wants us to ask, is Sakharine up to?
The answer was woven into the scene’s tapestry from the very start. Early in the scene we see a glass case with the words ‘Nev-R Break’ written on it. Clearly this case is important otherwise Spielberg wouldn’t show it us in such detail and clearly it’s going to take a lot to smash it. Positioned on a far away balcony, Sakharine can’t break it himself, but it does have to break, and Spielberg reminds us of that by referencing glass throughout the scene (Sakharine and Salaad’s glasses, Tintin’s binoculars, and the drinking glasses the guests are holding). These are our first clues — our second comes from Castafiore’s increasingly high-pitched singing. Banking of our knowledge of cartoon logic, Spielberg lets the audience come to the only conclusion a larger than life film like this can accommodate: Sakharine plans to use Castafiore to break the glass!
Spielberg pays the audience off spectacularly with a dazzling slow motion shot of the glass shattering (captured in 3D), allowing us to feel the giddy thrill of involvement that he failed to gain from The Greatest Show On Earth. More than that though, he’s encouraged us to look more critically at the image, analyse its every nuance and question those crafting them. Become too obsessed with the image, Spielberg reminds us, and you’ll fall prey to it like Salaad does, allowing wicked men like Sakharine to take advantage.
The Tintin Team
So prominent has Spielberg’s focus on father-son stories become, that it’s easy to neglect an even more significant thematic concern: community. Of course, the absence of the young Spielberg’s own father and his eventual divorce from his mother took its toll, but by that point the boy was already alienated. A self-proclaimed “wimp in a world jocks”, Spielberg was weak and gangly, making him easy fodder for bullies. His Jewishness only exacerbated the problem, making him feel particularly cut-off around Christmastime. Even the friendships he did make were short-lived. The nature of his father’s job as a computer engineer in the early days of digital technology meant the Spielbergs repeatedly relocated. No sooner had the young Spielberg moved to a new town, settled in, and made friends, then he and his family were upping roots all over again.
Spielberg’s childhood yearning was not just for a strong father figure, but a strong sense of community; it’s one of the reasons he became a director — surrounded by the surrogate community of cast and crew, he finally felt like he belonged. This translated on-screen in the bond between Quint, Hooper and Brody in Jaws, the massed crowds at the end of Close Encounters, the emotional goodbye that closes Schindler’s List and the scenes of togetherness between the soldiers of Saving Private Ryan. His overlooked 2004 comedy The Terminal, meanwhile, finds Tom Hanks’s immigrant Viktor Navorski shunned by the authorities and shut in an airport, before coming to embody the American Dream and transforming himself into a local hero. Rejection and acceptance. It’s Spielberg’s childhood dream come true.
Tintin isn’t quite as personal, but Spielberg does once again explore community — though this time, as with everything about Tintin, the theme is filtered through tour de force visuals. The community in Tintin is, of course, based around Tintin, Snowy and Haddock. The introduction shots I’ve mentioned previously establish not only their characters, but their relationships with the rest of the world: they’re both alone, captured by Spielberg in single, and somewhat claustrophobic, shots. The film’s drama will bring them together.
Haddock and Tintin’s gradual friendship is emphasised by two match cuts that would have been near-impossible to capture in live-action. The first comes at the end of the sequence on the lifeboat. Haddock and Tintin have resolved to row to land, but still being a blustering buffoon at this point, Haddock takes command, picking up the oars and knocking both Tintin and Snowy unconscious as he swings them into place. Spielberg then slowly pulls out of the ocean into a puddle. The lifeboat, now a dot in the puddle, remains, but not for long. A man walks into the puddle, his foot stepping onto the boat. This friendship is fragile — small and easily destroyed.
As the film progresses, so too does their friendship, and Spielberg emphasises its strength in a similar match cut that comes after Haddock has remembered enough of Sir Francis’s story to get his and Tintin’s mission back on track. Deciding to head to Bagghar, Tintin and Haddock shake hands, and Spielberg pulls in slowly to capture both men’s hands in a single frame. Gradually the scenery changes and the hands are no longer hands, but a mountain range carved in the shape of the interlocked limbs. On the horizon stand Haddock and Tintin, striding across the landscape on camels. They’ve become a team, and rather than being crushed by the world, they stand proudly above it backed by their friendship.
Similarly seamless editing is put to use during Haddock’s remembrances of Sir Francis. Here, the film flashes back to the moment the Unicorn was boarded by Red Rackham. It’s a traumatic tale, and Haddock feels every word, acting parts out in front of Tintin. Spielberg cuts back and forth between the two Haddocks, past and present, moving from one to the other on a common element — a prop, a close-up, a pose. Both Haddocks are played by Andy Serkis, and as such they share a similar physicality, while Spielberg’s total command of the frame ensures that every key element of the images match up perfectly.
Simple stylistic trick? By no means. The almost hallucinatory nature of Haddock’s storytelling and its use in helping him connect so directly with his family makes Tintin typical of the way Spielberg has updated his ideas of community in the modern day. Like Albert in War Horse and Tad in Lincoln, Haddock gets in touch with his sense of community by getting in touch with his past — the link between the two heightened by Spielberg’s seamless cutting between Haddock and Sir Francis. Only by looking back and appreciating the sense of community that once existed, Spielberg argues, can we hope to move forward and strengthen our bonds in the modern day.
Spielberg wraps this message up in the closing minutes by referring back to our introductions to the characters. As Tintin, Snowy and Haddock make their way to Marlinspike Hall, Spielberg captures the characters in three identical one-shots, each a close-up, each featuring a clear blue sky, each with the character looking off into the distance. The characters are alone in their frames, but the similarity of each shot to the others emphasises their development from the start of the film. New bonds have been discovered and a new team has been formed. Community has won out.
Conclusion
The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a perfect case study in Spielberg’s film-making. Like the Indiana Jones franchise it was compared to, the film shows how Spielberg can take somebody else’s material and a project that could be seen as impersonal, and turn it into a film that fundamentally reflects what he’s about. This is not perfect Spielberg, but it is pure Spielberg, the director’s imagination unencumbered for the first time by the restrictions of reality. For that reason alone, it ranks as one of his most significant offerings.
