Empire Releases First Images of Spielberg's 'Tintin' Movie

Stephen Spielberg has been trying to bring the adventures of the little mystery solver/explorer/adventurer Tintin to the big screen for years and it’s finally happening. Next year The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will finally be brought to the big screen as an animated film, Spielberg’s first as a director.

Spielberg originally intended to create a live action film, but was talked into an animated film by Peter Jackson who Spielberg originally went to for special effects work. Thus was born Tintin’s motion capture beginnings, which Spielberg feels will help maintain the look and feel of Hergé’s (the pen name of Belgian artist Georges Rémi) original art.

Tintin was a series of comic strips, first printed in 1929, that became an international hit and spawned a large number of magazines that were eventually adapted into various mediums (most notably for American audiences as an animated import that ran on HBO).

Empire released the first images of the film and they look pretty stunning. What else would you expect from the director that made sure we had realistic DIE-nuh-SARS terrorizing humans is Jurassic Park?

Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn features the voice work of Jamie Bell as the title character, Daniel Craig, Andy Serkis, Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Cary Elwes, and Toby Jones. The film hits theater on December 28, 2011.