At least 75 comics are being made into films currently in Hollywood. I have somewhat mixed feelings about these projects: in most cases a visually creative graphic novel with a complex storyline gets turned into a mediocre, run-of-the-mill CGI-heavy multi-million dollar Hollywood release, complete with McDonald’s tie-ins and bulk merchandise. I’ve developed some sort of an allergy for these gigantic releases and usually skip them altogether, even when one is critically well-received (I’m yet to see Sin City, for instance). On the other hand, some of my all-time favourite films are adaptations from literature, so why couldn’t a comic-based film be just as good? Maybe it’s just the boombastic no-holds-barred marketing of these Hollywood movies that keeps me from seeing them.
Frank Miller's Sin City got a visually successful film treatment (at least based on these covers!).
More likely though, adapting what is essentially a visual medium (comics) into another visual medium (film) is not such an easy task, especially when talking about live-action adaptations (as opposed to animation, where the stylistic qualities of the original work are more easily preserved). In this respect we are at quite an intriguing point in time as advancing CG technology is giving new possibilities for film makers to merge live-action and animation techniques. Recent examples of motion-capture assisted animation include The Polar Express and last year’s Beowulf, and while the results have been a bit too CGI-like to my liking so far, there’s no telling where we will be a few year’s down the road. Perhaps something like Scanner Darkly? (I’m not saying all comic adaptations must look like comics on the silver screen, but some of the visually more compelling ones might benefit from the new CG techniques.)
The way of future comic adaptations in Scanner Darkly?
An interesting project currently in the works is the series of new Tintin films with Steven Spielberg directing the first one and Peter Jackson the sequel. Jackson’s company WETA Digital, who also created the CGI animation for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, is animating Tintin based on live-action motion-capture. A 20-minute test reel was produced as a proof of concept, with Spielberg commenting to Variety:
Hergé’s characters have been reborn as living beings, expressing emotion and a soul which goes far beyond anything we’ve seen to date with computer-animated characters. We want Tintin’s adventures to have the reality of a live-action film, and yet Peter and I felt that shooting them in a traditional live-action format would simply not honor the distinctive look of the characters and world that Herge created.
Jackson further explained that the characters will not look cartoonish, though:
Instead, we’re making them look photorealistic; the fibers of their clothing, the pores of their skin and each individual hair. They look exactly like real people — but real Herge people!
At least there are enough influential names behind the project to guarantee creative freedom – now let’s just hope they put it to good use.
