“The Adventures of Tintin” is the first animated movie by Steven Spielberg, and the past and the present collide. The story is a return to the genre he does best, but the new technology is not all it’s cracked up to be. Tintin is based on the old Belgian comic books about a news reporter who goes to exotic locales and has grand adventures in the era when adventures were still possible. The movie is based off of only a few of the comics, of which there are around thirty, and tells the story of Tintin’s journey to find lost pirate treasure.

This movie is like a combination of “Indiana Jones” and “James Bond.” Because they animated it the possibilities for sequels are endless. With a traditional live action movie you have to worry about the actors aging and you’d have to replace them, but here they could conceivably make as many as they want. They could even write original stories once they run out of source material. This could be the next big franchise to replace “Harry Potter” that the studios have been searching for. The animation looks pretty amazing. A few of the characters look weird, but for the most part they navigate both sides of the uncanny valley. It’s as if the cartoonish characters have come to life, so no one actually looks realistic even though they look real (if that makes any sense). Let’s just say bulbous noses abound.

For the most part it’s an enjoyable time at the movies. There is one extended sequence in which there isn’t a single cut. It makes it feel like a theme park ride, which is not a good thing at all. It’s truly nauseating. Cuts can benefit a scene like that, and just because you can do something with a new medium doesn’t mean you should. It’s like how in Zemeckis’s motion capture films he was so enamored with the fact that his camera was not bound by any limitations that he over did it. All in all this is a pretty fun movie and once it starts the action never stops. The ending feels abrupt, the main thing the characters are looking for isn’t really found. It’s as if they ran out of time or something and just ended the movie in the middle. It really demands an ending with some resolution. But while not perfect, it’s still good.