Take a First Look at Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn!

The first images from Steven Spielberg's animated The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn have appeared online, and Empire magazine has an interview with Spielberg as well as producer and motion-capture pioneer Peter Jackson. Check out the Empire cover below, and hit the jump to read more of the interview and see two additional stills from the film! Click the thumbnails to view larger: "With live action you’re going to have actors pretending to be Captain Haddock and Tintin,” says Peter Jackson. “You’d be casting people to look like them. It’s not really going to feel like the Tintin Hergé drew. It’s going to be somewhat different. With CGI we can bring Hergé’s world to life, keep the stylised caricatured faces, keep everything looking like Hergé’s artwork, but make it photo-real.” What the hell is Tintin, you ask? The hero of the series is Tintin, a young Belgian reporter. He is aided in his adventures from the beginning by his faithful fox terrier dog Snowy (Milou in French). Later, popular additions to the cast included the brash, cynical and grumpy Captain Haddock, the bright but hearing-impaired Professor Calculus (Professeur Tournesol) and other colorful supporting characters such as the incompetent detectives Thomson and Thompson (Dupond et Dupont). Herge himself features in several of the comics as a background character; as do his assistants in some instances. And check out how Spielberg is going to bring that to life on the big screen: “The first part of the film, which is the most mysterious part, certainly owes much to not only film noir but the whole German Brechtian theatre — some of our night scenes and our action scenes are very contrasty. But at the same time the movie is a hell of an adventure." Spielberg and Jackson plan to adapt a whole slew of Tintin stories to the big screen, with Jackson slated to direct the second picture. However, complications involving The Hobbit may preclude that. But if the first one is as successful as he and Spielberg think they'll be, there are plenty of other Tintin tales to tell: “One of my favourites is The Seven Crystal Balls, so that’s the one I’ve always been thinking of,” Jackson says. “I also really like the Eastern European ones, the Balkan ones like King Ottoman’s Sceptre and The Calculus Affair. I think it’s a terrific setting for a thriller, the weird Balkan politics and the mysterious secret service agents. I think the Moon ones are terrific, but they’d be good for the third or fourth Tintin film, if we get that far. We want to keep his feet on the ground just a little bit longer.”  

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