As live-action blockbusters are bashed for overreliance on CGI, we’re looking back at a VFX marvel made in a grey soundstage.
Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson’s first foray into the world of animation sounds, in today’s terms, like a disaster waiting to happen. Shot in what looks for all the world like a really, really big stationery cupboard, it encompasses a lot of what disillusioned audiences today have come to associate with Disney’s live-action remakes of its back catalogue. There’s little obvious reason why Hergé’s simple line-drawings need converting to a photo-real 3D animation, just as it’s not immediately clear how The Lion King benefits from having all the words come out of real lions’ mouths.
In the context of motion-capture animation, too, The Adventures Of Tintin hardly has well-aged company. The likes of The Polar Express, Monster House and Beowulf – though technically impressive at the time – plant their flags so firmly into the uncanny valley they’ve since become rather difficult to watch.
But watching The Secret Of The Unicorn again in 2025, not only has the animation style aged far better than its contemporaries, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been made any other way. At once kinetic and fantastical, smooth and completely grounded, the production blends VFX technology with practical filmmaking more effectively than most nominally live-action rivals – and it was made, in filmmaking terms, in a near-identical way to plenty of blockbuster’s ridiculed for overreliance on VFX in the last few years.
A sequence early in the film finds our cowlicked globetrotter in a jam – literally. Chasing after a mysterious pickpocket onto a busy street, Jamie Bell’s Tintin ducks and weaves between speeding motorcars, the camera ducking and weaving with him. Piercing white headlights zoom from foggy pan-European alleys straight down the lens as a helpfully offered cane pulls the journalist and his faithful Snowy out of harm’s way. The shot lasts only a few seconds, but the feeling of momentum scarcely lets up over The Secret Of The Unicorn’s 107 minutes.
Combining Janusz Kamiński’s signature cinematography (he served as a lighting consultant for Weta Digital, and his unique blend of neo-noir light and contrast shines through every frame) with the physical heft of having a real person hold the camera, Spielberg was clearly having a blast with his new bag of technological tricks. The result is an authorial quality that we don’t often find in animation – a sense that this is undoubtedly a Steven Spielberg picture even as the camera flips under and over cars in ways clearly impossible outside of a computer.
Unlike most animated films, too, Tintin is a movie that really benefits from a cast of famous voices. In another scene, Daniel Craig (in full ‘champagne villain’ form as the moustache-twirling Ivan Ivanovitch Sakharine) gives a sort of double-take in the middle of a line read. In a live-action film this (ironically) wouldn’t make us look twice – here there’s an authenticity that even the most skilled digital artists would struggle to recreate from lines of code alone.
The result is a physicality to dialogue and action sequences that even the best examples of modern blockbuster animation – Puss In Boots: The Last Wish and Across The Spider-Verse, for example – struggle to match, enabled by a filmmaking process which allowed Spielberg to direct a completely VFX movie in the same way he would live-action, and wring out the best from both.
In a world where studios are constantly bashed for making blockbusters on blue-screen soundstages, it’s a reminder that great, physical filmmaking doesn’t have to be made with practical sets. It’s not always the tools you use – sometimes, it’s how you use them.
