James Forster - The A to Z of Tintin

The A to Z of Tintin

By James Forster

copyright 2013

"The idea for the character of Tintin and the sort of adventures that would befall him came to me, I believe, in five minutes, the moment I first made a sketch of the figure of this hero: that is to say, he had not haunted my youth nor even my dreams. Although its possible that as a child I imagined myself in the role of a sort of Tintin."

Herg

A is for...

Abdullah

The spoiled and obstreperous young son of Tintin's friend Emir Ben Kalish Ezab of the fictional Middle Eastern state of Khemed, Prince Abdullah features in Land of Black Gold and The Red Sea Sharks.

Abdullah loves practical jokes (though the recipients of these pranks most certainly do not!) and his favourite target is the long suffering Captain Haddock - who he affectionately refers to as "Blistering Barnacles!"

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn

A 2011 animated performance capture film directed by Tintin fan Steven Spielberg and the most ambitious cinematic Tintin project to date. The film was written by Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish and draws heavily on Herg's The Crab With The Golden Claws (1941) and The Secret of the Unicorn (1943) with a smattering of Red Rackham's Treasure (1944), mashing them up together for its plot with some new threads and dialogue thrown in.

The film features the voices of Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock, and Daniel Craig as the villain Sakharine.

The story begins (after an enjoyable title sequence and music by John Williams) with Tintin and his faithful dog Snowy in a flea market where he spies a wonderful model sailing ship named the Unicorn and decides to buy it. After refusing an offer to sell the ship, Tintin becomes embroiled in a mystery when a tiny scroll is revealed to be hidden in the mast. Sakharine kidnaps Tintin and throws him in the hold of the SS Karaboudjan where our hero meets the drunken Captain Haddock for the first time. First mate Allan (Daniel Mays) is working for Sakharine and has plied the sozzled Haddock with alcohol so that he has no idea what is happening on his ship and isn't in command anymore. Tintin and the Captain will soon begin their first globe hopping journey together as they escape and begin to unravel the secret of the Unicorn - a mystery that goes back centuries to the time of Haddock's ancestor Sir Francis.

What is good and bad about the film? The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn looks great at its best. Fantastic flashbacks of pirate sequences on the high seas, galleons lashed with water invading desert landscapes as a parched and dehydrated Haddock daydreams and hallucinates. Watch out for the Herg cameo at the start too. There is an awful lot of generic action in the film though, far too much really. One suspects it was an attempt to meet those new to Tintin half-way but the end result is rather tedious at times and the film becomes tiresome after a while. Tintin himself is a little too wide-eyed wonder jolly gosh (the Tintin of the books always gave one the impression of being wise beyond his years with great cunning and he did have emotions) but it's a passable interpretation. Captain Haddock however doesn't quite look like Haddock (too squat somehow) and Serkis plays him with a booming Scottish accent that might not be to all tastes. This Haddock is given too much sentimentality, even delivering motivational speeches to Tintin!

The CGI characters do enter the weird realm of the dead-eyed uncanny valley at times with the motion capture animation. Nick Frost and Simon Pegg are forgettable as the bumbling detectives Thomson and Thompson and the slapstick in the film loses something in the motion capture and is - unavoidably - never going to be as funny as the brilliant comic panels by Herg. Sakharine is changed from an eccentric collector into the grand villain (somewhat annoying if you love the books) and Daniel Craig's bored sounding monotone voice fails to make the refashioned baddie especially memorable. No Professor Calculus here (presumably he's being saved for the next film if they make one as he was only introduced in Red Rackham's Treasure) but they do shoehorn opera diva Bianca Castafiore (voiced by Kim Stengel) into the story in a rather contrived fashion. They seem to pilfer some plot thread from The Seven Crystal Balls here and imbue Castafiore with the glass shattering powers of Cacofonix the Bard in Asterix. The film moves away from the spirit of Tintin the most when they don't seem to trust the source material. Some new jokes (that aren't very funny), a hint of innuendo, and Indiana Jones/Jason Bourne type action sequences in the third act.

There are some nice sequences along the way (the fictitious port city Bagghar is superbly realised) but ultimately The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is more headache inducing than Herg.

Al Capone

The famed gangster makes his brief presence felt in Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America. Interestingly, Capone would be the last real life figure to appear in the series, making way for purely fictional villains. Herg's world building fictional Tintin universe would of course soon flourish and go from strength to strength without characters from the real world to complicate matters.

Allan Thompson

First introduced as the scheming and disloyal first mate of a drunken Captain Haddock in The Crab with the Golden Claws, the lantern jawed Allan is always up to his neck in criminal activities and is depicted later on in The Red Sea Sharks and Flight 714 as one of the main henchmen of Rastapopoulos.

The English language translations tend to discard his surname to avoid confusion with Thompson and Thomson.

Alonso Prez and Ramn Bada

Villains from The Broken Ear. An engineer and knife-thrower, the crooked pair tangle with Tintin after obtaining a diamond hidden in a fetish.

Aristides Silk

The pickpocket who plays a salient role in the plot of The Secret of the Unicorn.

B is for...

Bab El Ehr

An Arab insurgent who features in Land of Black Gold and plays an important behind the scenes role in The Red Sea Sharks. Bab El Ehr is a somewhat ruthless character who fights against the rule of Tintin's friend Emir Ben Kalish Ezab in the fictional Middle Eastern state of Khemed.

Barnaby

The man hired by the crooked Bird Brothers to find the parchments from the model ships in The Secret of the Unicorn.

Baxter

The Director General of the Sprodj Atomic Research Centre. Baxter appears in Destination Moon and Explorers on the Moon.

Bianco Castafiore

The flamboyant, shrill and formidable Italian opera diva who is the bane of Captain Haddock's life and often seems to end up in the same place as him - however far flung and unlikely.

The "Milanese Nightingale" is especially fond of the jewel song from Gounod's Faust - although Tintin and Haddock can happily live without her booming (and often impromptu) renditions. "Signora Castafiore! Run for it!" Castafiore was based on the famous American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas and, perhaps, Aino Ackt, a Finnish soprano, but Herg also drew on a grandmother who could never quite remember his name - just as Castafiore can never quite remember Haddock's name. "They were in ecstasies, weren't they Mr Paddock?" And Herg of course disliked the opera too, that was another natural element in the creation of the character. Castafiore first appeared in King Ottokar's Sceptre and is also in The Seven Crystal Balls, The Calculus Affair, The Castafiore Emerald, Tintin and the Picaros, and The Red Sea Sharks. Her presence is amusingly conveyed via the radio and nightmares Haddock endures in other adventures.

The Bird Brothers

The greedy and highly dangerous antique dealing villains from The Secret of the Unicorn. They operate from the grand Marlinspike Hall - which of course Captain Haddock inherits in the story arc that concludes with Red Rackham's Treasure.