Tintin! Tonnerre de Brest! Mille sabords!

Tintin! Tonnerre de Brest! Mille sabords!

In order to make “The Adventures of Tintin”, I have a feeling that Steven Spielberg tapped into that place that powered his “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Once again, an audacious hero finds himself in a relentless string of adventures involving exotic locales, megalomaniacal villains, planes, trains, automobiles and motorcycles and helicopters and ships at sea. It recalls Saturday afternoon serials in an age when most of the audience has never seen one.

I surprised myself by how much I enjoyed it. Not only does Spielberg use 3-D but he bases his story on one of Europe’s most beloved comic-strip characters. And like Scorsese did in “Hugo,” he pulls off the 3-D because he uses it as an enhancement to 2-D instead of an attention-grabbing gimmick.

Comic strip? Can we flash back? It’s a May morning at the Cannes Film Festival, and I’m drinking my coffee in the sunshine reading Nice Matin, the regional paper. There is a page in full color devoted to comics half the page is given over to Tintin. I ask a French friend about him. “You don’t know Tintin?” she exclaims with incredulity. “Zut!” He is so beloved, she tells me, that papers would rerun his old adventures after Hergé died.

This Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) is something else. He’s a newspaperman who seems never to go to the office but rather globetrots on an unimaginable expense account with his gifted dog Snowy always nearby; two bumbling Interpol inspectors named Thompson and Thomson often are involved; usually there is also a rum soaked old sea salt captain named Haddock (Andy Serkis). To me Tintin looks prepubescent but everyone treats him as sort of an honorary grownup. His yellow hair comes up to a quiff in the front.

Tintin’s adventures come in book-length, their pages the size of old Life magazines, drawn by Belgian artist Hergé with elegant clarity (the “clean line” approach). Sometimes a situation will require an entire page. Starting that year at Cannes, I read every single Tintin book even bought a Tintin and Snowy T-shirt. My little French-English dictionary was invaluable.

It was reported Spielberg would use motion capture technology on his characters. This seemed wrong wrong wrong: Not only does Tintin inhabit an adamantly 2-D universe, but he is manifestly not real. Anyone could draw him; his face has two dots for eyes and little curves for eyebrows and a mouth and nose that are like a sideways “U.” To make him seem more real would be to lose Tintin.

I ceased worrying during the movie’s opening scene. It was going to be all right. Tintin looked human if extremely streamlined; if an eyewitness were asked by a police artist for a sketch of well, you get the idea. The other characters are permitted more detail; Thomson and Thompson particularly are given noses that would make W.C. Fields weep with envy.

Spielberg and a group of artists and animators followed the Tintin strips not in their literal appearance but in their spirit. A more conventional 2-D version was done for television, and you can find it on YouTube; I like it, but Spielberg is more ambitious, and his characters seem more real as real as anyone created by Hergé. This movie involves the same headlong rush into adventure, with danger from explosives among other things. The race is to find a lost treasure with ancient connections to Capt. Haddock’s family.

There is one alteration that I did not appreciate. Spielberg too closely follows the lead of traditional action movies. There is gunfire in the Hergé comics, but there is so much going on here that it is distracting. Hergé spent more time on local color, character eccentricities and explosive dialogue, and I learned to mystify my friends with such Haddockisms as “Tonnerre de Brest!” (“Thunder of Brest!”) and “Mille sabords!” (“A thousand portholes!”).

Animation allows Snowy to do things that Spielberg could only dream of in live-action films. The little dog has always been dubious about his master’s daring schemes; Tintin will propose an expedition, and Snowy will think in a thought balloon, “Not by foot, I hope!” Some of the funniest moments in this movie involve Snowy’s determination to convey urgent information to dunderheaded humans.

“The Adventures of Tintin” is an ambitious and lively caper film that is miles smarter than your average 3-D family film (how can any thinking person want to see even one Chipmunks movie, let alone three?). It plays fair with Spielberg (who received Hergé’s blessing before his death in 1983). Eight hundred seventy-five portholes.

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