Spielberg and the Tintinologists
It won’t reach American screens until December, but Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn” opened this week in the U.K., where its dramatically quiffed protagonist is a more iconic figure. For a children’s adventure film, it has provoked some startlingly intense reactions in the British press. Writing in the Guardianlast week, the literary critic Nicholas Lezard made plain his distaste with Spielberg’s 3-D motion capture adaptation of Hergé’s classic comic-book series. Walking out of the screening, he writes, “I found myself, for a few seconds, too stunned and sickened to speak; for I had been obliged to watch two hours of literally senseless violence being perpetrated on something I loved dearly. In fact, the sense of violation was so strong that it felt as though I had witnessed a rape.”
