Odds & Ends

Saturday, March 29, 2008

The Casting of Tintin

The Age, via The Guardian, have the news that Thomas Sangster has been cast as Tintin in the upcoming Steven Spielberg / Peter Jackson mega-series.

Sangster's best known as Liam Neeson's stepson from Love Actually. I liked him in that film; he was sweet without being saccharine, and he seems like as good a choice as anybody. But the casting of this part really underlines the difficulty that still confronts the Tintin movies. By casting the 17 year old Sangster, the Spielberg and Jackson have acknowledged the popular description of Tintin as a "boy reporter." But in the comics Tintin's age is deliberately ambiguous; indeed, the intriguing thing about Tintin is that he's such a "blank" character. We can read almost anything into Tintin - his age, background, job and so on are left almost completely unexplored. (Even his gender is soft-pedalled; while he's definitely a boy, he's a fairly androgynous one).

But maybe Sangster will also become a cypher: we don't yet know quite how much the final film Tintin will look like Sangster, or whether his performance will be translated to a computer generated character who looks like the comic book character. I remain very curious about the proposed technique to be used for the film (and I talked about the difficulties of a computer-generated Tintin here); this could be either a breakthrough film for the medium or a Beowulf-esque testament to its shortcomings.

The other interesting news is that Andy Serkis is cast as Captain Haddock. I have previously expressed my admiration for Serkis' collaboration with the Weta people, but perhaps it's time to call "enough!" on the idea that Serkis can play anything or anyone through computer animation. I'm surprised they didn't go with John Rhys-Davies; while Serkis was obviously a comfortable choice for Peter Jackson in particular, I'd have thought Rhys-Davies would have been even more of a natural selection. After all, his two most famous roles are in Spielberg's Indiana Jones films and Jackson's Lord of the Rings series, and he has the bellicose bluster to make a good Haddock.

And whenever we mention Rhys-Davies, we have to mention his sort-of double: Brian Blessed. Perhaps he missed the casting call.