Listen very carefully and you will hear them. The rending of garments, the gnashing of teeth and incessant blathering about the dot-eyed detective of yore.
The Tintin traditionalists are out in force spreading the message that Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Herge's adventures is sacrilege. He should have left well alone, they cry.
Ignore those siren voices and march in to the cinema assured of a rollicking, roller-coaster ride that is, essentially, Indiana Jones, young again and freed from the restraints of gravity and risk assessment by dint of the magic box of animation.
Herge famously declared that Spielberg was the natural choice to put the young reporter on film.
Spielberg has nursed the ambition ever since and found a convenient hole in his schedule just as another boy wonder (Harry Potter) left the scene.
The story - Secret Of The Unicorn - is pure Indy. Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) stumbles upon an ancient scrap of paper hidden within an old model square-rigger that hints at a squall of secrets.
Others want answers, mostly the nasty Ivan Ivanovictch Sakharine (Daniel Craig) and the criss-crossing quest to track down further clues and find the treasure takes Sakharine and Tintin around the world by boat, by plane, by car, by crane, clashing at awkward junctures and, in Tintin's case, bumping into friends old and new along the way.
These include Thomson and Thompson (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg), the cantankerous Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis) and, of course, his perceptive sidekick Snowy.
The action never stops. The setpieces are gems of artistry and daring. One sequence featuring pirate galleons clashing in a storm trumps that other pirate film while a chase through a desert town is a triumph of inventiveness.
Motion capture has never quite worked - and it doesn't entirely here (it won't until they get the mouths right) but it is by far the most accomplished attempt at the technique yet.
The backdrops are full of rich detail, as lush as a Baroque master.
And if the script (by a trio of big-name Brits Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish) doesn't entirely ignite and the story flags towards the end, the return to the values of the Boys' Own adventure story is more than enough to quicken the pulse.
– From October 2011
