It was a big risk taking such a much-loved cartoon character and throwing it in with an equally loved director and hoping that it would somehow work amazingly, but in the end it seemed to come together well at the cinema. However, one of the big question marks over The Adventures Of Tintin: Secret Of The Unicorn DVD is how well the chunky looking animation translates down to the small screen format, but the reality is that the charm of the characters Hergé’s would translate well to a 12″ black and white set.
Directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), the animated movie adaptation had pretty big Hollywood heavyweights sitting in the hot seats behind set. If that wasn’t enough it also had the random might of Steven Moffat (Sherlock), Edgar Wright (The World’s End) and Joe Cornish (Attack The Block) as its writers.
Released on the 19th March 2012, The Adventures Of Tintin: Secret Of The Unicorn DVD is the small screen delivery of a big screen hit that did well in terms of both box office success and critical acclaim. The performance capture 3D animation looked impressive on the supersized screens, and if you’ve got a big enough TV with the latest 3D technology you can probably recreate an element of that from the comfort of your sofa.
The film is the first of Hergé’s epic children’s cartoons to be made into a film in the 21st Century, combining the storyline of The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, three of his most well known comic books first published in the 1940s.
Starting out with Tintin, played by Jamie Bell, and his first meeting with Captain Haddock, played by Andy Serkis (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), the legendary odd couple set out to find Haddock’s ancestral treasure. In the process they must put together the mystery of the sinking of the Captain’s distant relative Sir Francis Haddock’s ship, the Unicorn, at the hands of the dread pirate, Red Racham, who was played by Daniel Craig (Skyfall). However, they’ve also got to stay one step ahead of the nefarious Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine (also played by Daniel Craig) who’s concealing his own motives to search for the secret to the mystery.
So far, so Tintin. There’s also the addition of Simon Pegg (The World’s End) and Nick Frost (Attack The Block) as Thomson and Thomson to look forward to for anyone that didn’t catch Secret of the Unicorn at the flicks, as well as a small cameo for McKenzie Crook as thug Tom.
With talk of a sequel in the making, it’s a DVD that will inevitably become a part of either a trilogy or longer term series.
