TV Impressions: The Adventures of Tintin (1991-1992)

 

Back in June of 2021, I reviewed the 2011 Steven Spielberg movie, The Adventures of Tintin. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, in fact I'd probably rank it rather high on the list of movies I watched for this blog. While some parts of it were utterly stupid, I still quite enjoyed the movie for what it was, and thought that it was a good movie for fans and newcomers. Being a Tintin fan myself, I figured it was about time I crossed that movie off of my list. Now originally I was going to leave it at that, but around November of that same year I looked at the 2017 DuckTales series, having just finished watching it with my folks. So, now that I am experimenting with reviewing animated television shows on this blog, I thought this show would be a good entry for this sub-series.

I believe I have stated before that this show was my introduction to Tintin. Amazing how I get into comics through cartoons. So I have a special attachment to this show, however I will say that finally going through the entire series, I do have a few issues with it.

Now, I've mentioned that this series has the voice cast that I am most familiar with, which is why I had trouble getting accustomed to Jamie Bell's performance as Tintin in the movie. Not that it was bad, but I was used to Colin O'Meara's voice. It's weird that these two would be the voices people would associate with the character, because isn't he supposed to be Belgian? I don't really have a problem with the voice cast,I think they all did a great job, and there are surprisingly little recognizable names, unless you're Canadian and know who Maureen Forrester or Wayne Robson are. Either way, I think the voice cast did well for their roles.

I think my first real issue with the series is how it fiddles around with continuity. Now they did not adapt the first or second Tintin adventures, those being Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and Thintin in the Congo, though Tintin in the Congo has kind of been disowned by everyone involved. However, they did adapt the third book, Tintin in America. The third book in the series becomes the final episode of the cartoon. The order they ran this series in is strange, while stories that directly follow the events of the ones that precede them (Such as "Red Rackham's Treasure" and "Prisoners of the Sun") are in their proper order, the rest of the adapted episodes are in a strange order. For example, because the first adapted adventure is "The Crab with the Golden Claws", Captain Haddock is introduced very early in the series, which makes sense because he is a main character afterwards. However, because of the shuffling of episodes, he just does not appear in some episodes, because there were eight comics prior to Haddock's introduction. This mostly becomes a problem with the placement of the story "Tintin and the Picaros", which was the last comic of the series, with the exception of "Tintin in Alph-Art". This story, feels like a finale, it brings a lot of our favourite characters together, puts them in one big plot, and pretty much closes the story on one of Tintin's rivals. In this series, "Tintin and the Picaros" makes up the twenty-first and twenty-second episodes of the series. Not even close to the final episode of the series.

That is another thing to mention, most of the episodes are two parters. With the exception of "Red Rackham's Treasure", "The Shooting Star", and "Tintin in America", every episode is split into two. That being said, these are rather long books for comics, most of the books are about sixty-two pages long, so it was probably more of a creative decision to put more of the original books into each episode as possible. All in all I'd say it was a good decision.

Disregarding the episode shuffling, most of the stories remain pretty accurate to the original comics. They do have some minor changes here and there, but very few things that alter the story significantly. You can find lists of all the changes online, but most of them seem to have been cut for time or to make the plot run a bit more smoothly. I think the 2011 movie made changes that made sense for the story it was trying to tell, it was most likely trying to be it's own Tintin story on some level. However, as these are trying to be more accurate retellings of the comics, the minimal changes work to its favour.

So, do I prefer the show or the movie? I think it really is going to depend on what you're in the mood for. I will say that on a technical level, the movie is better. I noticed some animation errors in the TV show, but overall I think it was animated well. Definitely has that 1980s feel to the animation. However, I did have some issues with the movie's plot, so if you want a more accurate depiction of these comics, I would have to recommend the show. Just a quick word of warning though, this cartoon was made in the 1990s, and was based off of comics that originated in the 1930s, they aren't exactly perfectly-PC by today's standards. That being said, they aren't as bad as you might think. One episode deals with a group of Roma, and Tintin and Haddock are remarkably kind to them, even giving them the benefit of the doubt when they're thought to have stolen an emerald. I don't think this series has aged too badly, but it has aged, kind of like the original DuckTales. If you can get past that, then I do recommend this series, and if your only experience with Tintin has been the 2011 movie, I'd say this is a good place to continue. Not a fantastic series by any means, but worth watching if it's available.

First Impressions: Ella and the Little Sorcerer (AKA Little Sorcerer; AKA Cinderella and the Spell Binder) (2022)

 

I watch a lot of things for this blog, things I would not normally watch on my own. On the one hand, this has introduced me to movies that I loved like Isle of Dogs, The Adventures of Tintin, and Encanto. On the other hand, it means I often have to watch movies like this. I mean, what is this movie? No seriously what is it, and why was it worthy of a theatrical release?

This movie comes to us from Gold Valley Films an animation studio that is most known for... well probably this movie now. They've done a few other movies, like Academy of Magic and a Mulan movie, but I don't believe either of those got a theatrical release in my city. Did they get a theatrical release elsewhere, I'm genuinely curious, I'd love to know. Anyway, I have to wonder why this movie got a theatrical release. It doesn't look like a theatrical movie, it isn't written like one, and it's a sequel, yeah this movie is a sequel, it follows the events to Cinderella and the Secret Prince from 2018. Which is probably a good time to mention that the date in the title is not entirely accurate. See, this movie was actually released in 2021, IMDb and Letterboxd both say this. However, it is my policy that movies that get theatrical releases, or big releases on a major streaming service, in one year count as a movie for that year. This is why I consider Animal Crackers a 2020 movie and not a 2017 movie. It's initial release was 2017, but it was released onto Netflix in 2020, likewise this movie got a theatrical release in 2022.

I am half convinced this movie got a theatrical release either as a joke or a test. Like someone wanted to see if there was still a viable option for animated films that weren't Disney or DreamWorks, so they just grabbed some movie that was released last year, held onto it until the "Box Office Bomb" season was over, but didn't hold on to it for so long as to make it seem like a good movie. Hell, I barely saw any advertising for this movie, there was like a mini-trailer they played in the lobby, and there was one of those quiz-screens they show during the pre-show, and that was it. Clearly my theatre had no faith in the one, so I have to ask, why was it given a theatrical release?

The movie reminds me a lot of Arctic Dogs, because it had the look, feel and writing of a direct to video movie. At the very least Arctic Dogs had a pretty good sized cast, with the likes of Alec Baldwin, Heidi Klum, John Cleese, Anjelica Huston, James Franco and Michael Madsen. This movie doesn't even have a very recognizable cast. Then again, this movie was better than Arctic Dogs, to some extent.

The animation was just not theatrical quality. A lot of movements looked mechanical, like I could almost see the motion paths the characters and objects were following. Some of the mouth movements didn't look right, and I'm not sure if this was because they dubbed the dialogue or if it was always just that mediocre. They also made a lot of the character models to be non-human, which I feel is something that a lot of direct-to-video kids movies do, like "this character has no reason to be a tortoise, but let's make him one anyway, what else? We need someway to have the characters cross the ocean? Okay what models do we have? The Globglogabgalab? whatever make it fluffy and we'll call it a cloud!".

Then there is the writing, and seriously, there was a good amount of this movie I could just see coming. Like, they had out main characters split up, and for a while it "Looks" like one of the characters is gonna turn evil. I mean, can you guess the others are gonna go back for her and try to talk her back onto their side? I guess I should be too hard on this, because this is a movie for really little kids, and this could probably be their first exposure to this kind of conflict, but it was just so badly written. If I didn't see a plot point or a punchline coming, it was still predictable either way.

I know this movie is for really little kids, but so was the Blue's Clues movie, and that was still a good movie. It really is the difference between a show like Sesame Street and a show like Teletubbies. They're both for a similar audience, but there is a reason one has lasted  for over fifty years and the other didn't. I guess it's not an absolutely awful movie, really it's more just a whole lot of nothing, but overall, I can't recommend it. At least it's better than Adventures of Buck Wild.

First Impressions: Turning Red (2022)

 

Okay, full admission here, I did not really want to do this. Not that this is a bad movie, far from it, I think it's really well done. However, it is not a movie for me. Sometimes you watch a movie that is just not something you're into, and that's okay. However, this movie has a lot of... discourse for want of a better term, surrounding it, and to top it all off Disney is facing another controversy, and if that wasn't enough, there is a certain blog post or two that may need some addressing. So, I'm going to give you my very quick thoughts on the movie, the stuff I liked about it, the stuff I didn't really like, and then I'll go into all of the other stuff surrounding it.

So, Turning Red. I don't think I really get to talk about Pixar on this blog that much, I mean the last First Impressions blog I did on one of the studio's movies was Onward, and the last Pixar movie to get a proper review was Toy Story 3 back when I did my Toy Story marathon in preparation for Toy Story 4. I really don't talk about Pixar that much, and it's a shame because they are one of my favourite studios. Granted I haven't watched all of their movies, but I definitely put them pretty much at the same height as Laika. So I was at least interested in Turning Red on the merit that it's the latest Pixar film. Pixar has been doing something very interesting recently, as more and more of their movies are about people. I mean they still have their movie about a non-human protagonist, but for most of the 2010s, they've been about people or human like people. I think this is a very interesting direction and I'm curious to see where it will lead.

As for Turning Red itself, I do think it's a good movie. I really like the animation style, sure the mouths did take a bit to get used to, but the eyes, oh my goodness the eyes. The eyes were like a perfect mix of anime expressiveness and CG liveliness. On top of that I love the character designs, I like how they aren't the typical "Little Girl" type designs, they aren't the "glitz and glamour Hollywood picture perfect" cute girl design. I think this is wonderful. I'm not too fond of the writing, well, not too fond of it until the last third or so of the movie. Look, one of my biggest worries of Encanto was that I was going to tell where it was gonna go and, yeah I had that feeling at times during the movie. However, the characters, I think we all knew at least one of these kids growing up, like we all knew a Sid or a Remy, we either knew these kids or were one of these kids. I like Mei's father, I think he's a great parental figure. This movie is full of good elements, and I do not want anyone to walk away from this post thinking that I hated this movie, aside from the plot, I like pretty much everything about this movie. Plus, being set in Canada just made it a bit more familiar for me, granted I've never been to Toronto (West coast is best coast), but still, it's nice to see a more mainstream movie that is set in my home country.

So, why was the movie getting scrutiny before it came out? Some people didn't like the art style, some people thought the characters weren't realistically written, and some people just think a movie like this counts as pandering. Look, it's okay if you don't like the art style, being someone who never cared for Klasky-Csupo I get it, sometimes a style just does not appeal to you. However, I don't think I've ever used Klasky-Csupo to put down anything, not western animation, not 90s cartoons, not Nickelodeon. That is one thing I can't stand about animation discourse, most people will just look at one piece of western animation they don't like and try to hold up some garbage anime because "It looks better, forget the story and characters, looks are all that matters." Yeah, this is why I stopped playing modern video games. If you don't like the visual style, that's fine, but don't act as if that is the be all or end all of a cartoon or movie. As for the other complaints, I'm not even gonna dignify them. Maybe these kids don't act like real kids, and Sponges don't live in Pineapples, and traumatized children don't fight crime dressed as a bat, it is fiction, and it can take some liberties, and if this movie is pandering, than what would you call it if Pixar made a movie specifically to cater towards the people complaining about this movie, because that is also pandering you know.

And about my previous Pixar post, I wanted to save that for this post, but I wrote that all the way in January because I just could not hold onto it until now. So, do I still think Pixar is in trouble? Maybe it is a bit pessimistic to see Pixar and the "next Blue Sky Studios", but I'm still gonna be cautious about it. We'll see how Lightyear gets treated and then I'll make the call on whether I was right or wrong. Really, I was envisioning this post a lot more like my Adventures of Buck Wild post, which I spent just ragging on Disney and that was the plan for that post. Man, if only I had waited, then I could have written something about Bob Chapek funding the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida, which tells people by law what they can and can't say, which is censorship. Literal, actual censorship that is against the first amendment. #DisneySayGay #DontSayGayisCensorship

No, I'm still not gonna forgive Disney, for anything. However, I will be honest and say when I'm urinating on their head. Turning Red is a good movie, I think it's a well-made outing from Pixar, do I think it's gonna be the best animated movie of the year? Considering what I have seen so far, I don't think so. Really this just is not a movie for me, I'm putting this along side Coraline and Wolfwalkers. However, even in those cases I do have to say that the movie is still worth seeing, so what if it isn't for me? It's not hurting anyone by existing (Music), asking people to look past some really insensitive material (Dog) or being an insult to cinema or animation (The list of movies I could name here are numerous, so let's just pick The Lion King 2019 as the blanket example), if you enjoy it, I'm not going to fuss. It is not my thing, but I still give it a recommendation.

Felidae (1994) - A Dark and Thrilling Mystery Movie for Adults

There are some movies that have a reputation for very understandable reasons. I'm not talking about a "So bad it's good" reputation or a "annoying fanbase" reputation here, I'm talking controversy, and a weird grey area of controversy, an area where the film was controversial enough to warrant a limited release, but not enough to be full on banned. Felidae is a German movie that did not get a major release in English speaking countries, and while I can find no evidence of this movie being banned in any country, as far as most people are concerned it may as well be. Felidae is a dark, violent and very sexual animated movie, I cannot stress this fact enough, this movie is not for children, this is a movie strictly for adults. Don't let the fact that this movie is about cats fool you, it is not for kids. However, should this movie get a more official widespread release? And is it worth seeing as an adult?

Felidae is based on a book, by Akif Pirinçci, which I have not read, and is about a cat named Francis who investigates a series of feline murders that happen around his new home with an old and deformed cat named Bluebeard. This investigation leads Francis to a cult, gives him strange dreams, and leads him down to meeting a small cast of colourful cats and finding weird and twisted locations. This is a crime mystery through and through, and it has a lot of the tropes you would expect in a crime thriller, the red herrings, the surprise murder, the twist reveal, it's all here, and I think it is all executed very well. To be honest, I'm not a big consumer of mystery media, I have seen a few crime mysteries like The Usual Suspects, but the only other animated one I watched was Sherlock Gnomes, which I should not have to tell you was bad. However I think it is a good comparison here, because after that movies first reveal, I guessed there would be a second one. I think the key difference here is that, Sherlock Gnomes expected us to be fooled by what are common tropes and clichés that lots of animated movies use, whereas Felidae... well not being a movie for kids definitely gives it a lot more wiggle room.

Yeah, it is time to address the big part of this movie, the violence, blood and sexual references. Is it too much? The problem with answering this question is that, "too much" is a very loose amount that varies from person to person. A cup of liquid is too much for a shot glass, but not enough for a milk jug, and when it comes to art and media, sometimes we're shot glasses, and sometimes we're milk jugs. What we can and cannot tolerate will depend on many factors, including how the material is presented. For example, if "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was not humourous or tongue-in-cheek about topics like the purpose of existence and the nature of the universe, I don't think it would be one of my favourite books, and Felidae takes the deaths and dismemberments seriously, it's not really "Let's look at these bodies to make the viewers uncomfortable", it's more "If we're gonna pull this off, we need to show the bodies".

I do want to make it clear, if blood and gore, animal cruelty and conversations about sex do make you uncomfortable, there is no problem with giving this movie a pass. Cats get electrocuted, cut open, experimented on, burned with acid, and disemboweled all on screen, and we see the body of a decapitated cat in this movie too. Personally, I think this movie went as far as it needed to, but even then that may be too far for some. This is a good point to reiterate that this is not a movie for kids, and again, if some of these topics sound too much for you, I won't blame you if you decide to skip it.

The characters in this movie are interesting. Francis is a good protagonist, determined to solve the case, but he is not a hard ass or grizzled, he still cracks jokes with Bluebeard, who is the more grizzled of the two, but still has his friendlier and dumber moments. Throughout the movie, I was as invested in the mystery as Francis was, and I laughed with him and Bluebeard when they took playful jabs at each other. I will say, the voice acting was not particularly great, I watched an English dub that was uploaded to YouTube in 2013, which I'm assuming is an official dub. It sounded professional enough, but it's very bland in a lot of places, like they were recording for an audiobook.

That leads me nicely into the technicals of the movie. The rest of the sound is fairly good, the score is nice and does its job well. A lot of the sound mixing is really good though, there was a scene where Francis is escaping some cats chasing him, and during a fall his claws scratch a metal pipe and the sound just made me wince, but it a good way. The animation on the other hand, very nice. Apparently the animation was outsourced to about ten different studios, if you really pay attention you could probably tell what scenes were done by different studios, there was one dream sequence that was marvelously done in a much different style to the rest of the movie, with a lot of linear detail and some odd fade effect between the movement it was really well done. Apparently that scene was done by the main animation studio TFC Trickompany. I will say, I noticed some objects that, if they weren't CG I would be surprised, because this was the era that animated movies began to incorporate more CG into their style, but even then the rest of the movie is very well drawn and animated.

Felidae is a weird movie to really rate. On the one hand, I quite liked it. I enjoyed the lead character, I was invested in the mystery, it was exciting and thrilling, well made all around. On the other hand, the content and subject matter may be a bit much for some viewers. I do have to consider stuff like this, because I rank these movies by how I would recommend them, and typically a movie I have to put an asterisk next to would fall into the "Slight Recommendation" category. However, I want to stress that this is the kind of movie I want to see more of in animation, one that is strictly for adults, and not in the South Park or Simpsons movie sense. This is a kind of adult animated movie I don't think I've seen anything like, a story that would be very different if told in live action. Goodness, imagine is this was done in the style of the Cats Broadway show, that would be hilarious. Anyway, overall, I want to see more movies like this in animation, however, I do have to concede that when I recommend this movie, I am always going to have to say "But..." when doing so. "Oh yeah, this movie is good, but...", "I quite enjoyed it, but..." it's not a movie I can whole heartedly recommend. It's not great, but if it sounds like something you can stomach, go for it, and if it sounds too much for you, that's understandable too.