When the first teaser trailer for The Adventures of Tintin — Steven Spielberg’s motion-capture adaptation of the times and travails of everyone’s favorite Belgian newspaper reporter — the animation was highly scrutinized, with the reactions mostly overlooking all the other elements in favor of searching for flaws in Spielberg’s use of the much-maligned mo-cap practice. Now that the second trailer has been released … well, it’s still hard not to focus on the animation. So, how’s it looking? Pretty good, actually. This full trailer starts off like the teaser, with all dialogue delivered via voice-over, and therefore immediately makes one suspicious that the animators haven’t yet managed to make the characters look normal while moving their mouths. Eventually, though, we do get to see people talking — and fighting, and flying planes, and wielding guns, and being electrocuted, and weathering explosions, and dramatically sliding down boat decks. (Captain Haddock looks particularly realistic.) It’s not perfect yet, for sure, but at this rate, the final product might be something special.
