REVIEW: The Adventures of Tin Tin - Secret of the Unicorn (PG)

 This morning I went to watch The Adventures of Tin Tin - Secret of the Unicorn expecting big things - directed by Steven Spielberg, co-written by Steven Moffat, produced by Peter Jackson, score by John Williams and a trailer that showed some of the finest animation ever produced - I wasn't to be disappointed.



 Tin Tin (let's call it that for simplicity) is a tremendous romp - buckles are swashed with abandon, there's tension and action, fantastic chase scenes and a fair bit of humour and levity.

The movie opens in the visual style of the original Tin Tin books (and the old television series) with a pre-story a bit like the pre-title sequence in a Bond movie before shifting into the modern animation.

The movie combines three Herge stories: Red Rackham's Treasure, The Crab with the Golden Claws and The Secret of the Unicorn. Tin Tin (Jamie Bell) meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and follow clues to find the treasure of the Captain's ancestor, Sir Francis Haddoque. There's Snowy the dog and the Thompson Twins (played by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) and some great baddies.

The animation is truly magnificent - it's a mixture of Motion Capture and more traditional/CGI techniques. For the vast majority of the movie you forget that it's animated, so good is the animation and characterisation. This does, of course, raise the question.... 

Why not use real actors?

There's truly amazing reflections in multiple mirrors and distortion through a magnifying glass; there's floods and waves and waterfalls and breaking glass.... it's all there. They've moved the bar for animation not an inch or two but several yards.

The use of 3D is good - I mean, the vast majority of the time you don't notice it, it seems totally integrated into the movie and, apart from one moment (you'll spot it) there's no silly 3D gimmicks.

Many of the chases (and much of the finale) feel like they could have been in a new Indiana Jones movie - particularly when he climbs aboard a motorbike:



John Williams' score is, as you would expect, brilliantly cinematic and combines big orchestral sounds with hints of West Side Story-jazz rhythms and even some French (Belgian?) accordion music.  It does, though, lack the big memorable tune that is usually Williams' thumbprint - the 5-note Tin Tin leitmotif isn't, to my mind, catchy enough and feels rather like Danny Elfman's Batman theme.

This is, without doubt, the movie event of the year.

Could an animated movie win best picture at next year's Oscars?