Tintin et moi

If you as I have a very close and long relationship with the world of Tintin....do yourself a favor and watch this beautiful documentary about Hergé and his life creating Tintin. I'ts so brilliant and a very cool production. The whole background story about Hergé and the people and also very much the many different situations he was influenced by, for good and worse is amazing. There is a very fine and obvious connection between the comic books and just this. I will for sure be in my basement digging up the Tintin albums again. Also, the movie itself are very well told and has a great ambient sound to it. I really do hope people will find this as intriguing as I did!

"Tintin and I" first of all struck me as a masterpiece documentary. The photography and the editing are truly breath-taking (almost anti-Dogma).

We follow the life of Tintin drawer Hergé through an open-hearted interview from 1971. The Tintin series was drawn on the background of the great ideological fights of the twentieth century. In the midst of these Hergé has his own demons to fight with, and much of his drawing activity seems like an attempt to tame these and to escape into a world of perfection.

Even though there are spectacular photographic panoramas of drawings from Tintin albums and also some reconstructions and reading of passages from the albums, the story of Hergé is told entirely through interviews and archive material, and never through reconstructions.

Hergé lived the turbulent life of a true, suffering artist. But the fantastic world that came of his imagination will continue to amaze readers again and again.

Tintin and I recently aired as an episode of PBS's P.O.V. series. It's based on a taped interview of Georges Remi a.k.a. Herge, Tintin's creator, from 1971 in which in discusses his various experiences publishing his popular character, first in a Catholic newspaper, then in his own series of comic books. Awesome sweeping views of various comic pages and surreal images of Herge's dreams. I first encountered Tintin in the pages of Children's Digest at my local elementary school library reading The Secrets of the Unicorn. My mom later got a subscription to CD and I read the entire Red Rackham's Treasure every month in 1978. I remember seeing some Tintin comic books in a local book store after that but for some reason I didn't get any probably because I was 12 and I thought I was outgrowing them. I do have Breaking Free, a book written and drawn by J. Daniels, published in 1989, six years after Herge's death. Haven't read it yet. This film also covers the artist's personal life as when he left his first wife after his affair with a colorist in his employ (whom he later married). Her name is Fanny and she is interviewed here. If you love Tintin and his creator, this film is definitely worth a look. Update: 9/4/07-I've now read Breaking Free. Tintin and The Captain are the only regular characters that appear here and they are tailored to the anti-capitalist views of Mr. Daniels with Tintin portrayed as a rabble rouser with a chip on his shoulder who nevertheless cares for The Captain who he's staying with. The Captain here is just trying to make ends meet with a wife and daughter that he loves dearly. They and other construction workers vow to strike after a fellow employee dies from a faulty equipment accident. The whole thing takes place in England with working-class cockney accents intact. Not the kind of thing Herge would approve of but an interesting read nonetheless. Oh, yes, dog Snowy only appears in the top left corner of the cover (which has Tintin running over the police!) and the dedication page.

Quite frankly one of the best films I've ever seen about an artist and the process of creating art. I didn't grow up reading Tintin, but am mighty tempted to start now as an adult.

While the film succeeds at all levels in telling the story of Hergé's life, what really sets it apart is the filmmaker's masterful way of conveying the feeling of what it was like to be Hergé and what it means to live the greater part of one's life through the characters one has created. Time and time again, it was the emotion of the moment that got me, drawing me closer and closer to Hergé, and compelling me forward into the next scene and the next element of the artist's life, which cast yet another new light on who he was and what drove him.

This is an utterly timeless film about the joys and despair of being an artist. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Using a series of tape recorded interviews with Georges Remy over thirty years ago by Numa Sadoul, this documentary builds a visual element and also includes contributions from others to deliver a documentary that was a lot more interesting than I expected it to be. You see for me I have never been more than a casual reader of the Tintin books and drew them from my local library at the same time as getting the Asterix books so I must admit that I wasn't too bothered about finding out more about the creator himself.

So it was a slow start for me but gradually the film drew me in because it does such a good job of maintaining the link between the man and his books, which I think is important for those viewers who are into the books but not the wider world thereof. Thus we get an understanding of the background that the strips and books were written against and how changes within the man, his employment and his country are shown within the changes in his work. Later in the film we mainly focus on the man himself but by then I was mostly engaging thanks to the nature of the delivery before this point. Of course the viewer does need to have at least some interest in the Tintin books beyond them just being comics they read as a child but the film does do a good job of trying to come and meet the audience halfway.

Overall then an interesting documentary that does try hard to overcome the fact that it was always going to appeal to a small audience no matter how good it was. Accordingly it does need you to at least care about the books and characters but it does help those of us who previously knew nothing of Hergé to have something that is still worth seeing.