Pushing the limits of computer animation – The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn
Our previous articles discussed the trend of realism in computer animation, and how some computer-animated movies, namely Toy Story and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, chose to radically distinguish themselves from it and revolutionized computer animation twenty years apart. There was still however a certain type of aesthetic to be found in realistic 2010s computer-animated movies. Thus, while major animation studios were perfecting their techniques, directors of live-action movies took hold of these tools to try to translate their vision.
The 2011 animated movie The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn is a very interesting case to study in this respect. It is indeed one of the best examples of trying to close the gap between live-action and animation.
Adapting Tintin’s adventures on the big screen has always proved tricky, because Hergé’s style – called in French la ligne claire, which translates to "clear line" – is difficult to translate to cinema and especially in live-action. Finding actors to play those emblematic characters or transliterating visual gags is a perilous operation. Nevertheless, Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson decided in the 2000s to rise up to the challenge. Both directors are VFX enthusiasts and they decided to use a hybrid technique: performance capture.
This 1990s technique came from the video game first. It involves picking up actors’ expressions and movements thanks to suits and sensors to translate it best to 3D animation. Video games such as Prince of Persia or The Last of Us use it to make their characters look the most realistic way possible. Peter Jackson knows performance capture very well, since he used it himself to create Gollum in Lord of the Rings. With this technique, directors reasoned they did not have to find actors whose primary appeal was their resemblance to the original comics’ characters anymore.
Other criteria were prioritized: the way they move or emote, or their voices. Directors could hire anyone they wanted and then make the magic happen through VFX. Hence why, for Secret of the Unicorn, performance capture imposed itself as the perfect compromise between pure computer animation and a live-action movie. It gives the movie a peculiar look: it is easy to recognize that it is not only computer animation, but it is difficult to pinpoint exactly what is different from the usual movies.
This might be why the experience was not very successful: Hergé’s aficionados did not get their bearings and the general public sometimes found the movie visually weird – flirting with the uncanny valley. Performance capture pushes the limits of what we consider realistic and it can make the viewers uncomfortable. But it also created a debate in the industry: can performance capture be considered as animation? The movie’s animators explained that performance capture was just a tool they used to keep the actors’ facial expressions but looking at it, it is hard to decipher what is animation and what is performance capture. As a result, if performance capture seemed to be the best choice on paper, the results were flawed. The movie did not bring forth a new animation era, and performance capture is still used parsimoniously in VFX techniques. But who knows? In the future, it may very well be a tool to innovate computer animation.
