Snowy sold Spielberg on idea of animated ‘Tintin’

• Reprints

Snowy, the rambunctious canine hero of “The Adventures of Tintin,” does “things that no dog could ever possibly do.”

Updated: February 14, 2012 8:00AM

Director Steven Spielberg was intent on doing a live-action Tintin movie until he saw Snowy.

In 2005, he reached out to fellow filmmaker Peter Jackson to have his Weta Digital visual-effects company test the feasibility of creating a fully animated version of Tintin’s adventurous dog. While on the set of his movie “War of the Worlds,” Spielberg received a DVD featuring a photo-realistic digital animal paired with Jackson dressed up as the drunken Captain Haddock. (The Venture, the large ship in Jackson’s “King Kong,” acted as the backdrop for the test reel.)

“He’s not just Tintin’s dog. He turns out to be everybody else’s companion — or their worst enemy,” Spielberg says.

In Hergé’s original Tintin comic-book stories, Snowy had a running narrative and his own inside jokes courtesy of thought bubbles. He doesn’t speak in the movie “The Adventures of Tintin,” but his canine stunts and attitude steal many scenes.

“If Captain Haddock spills a bit of whiskey on the ground or the bottle tips over, then Snowy’s the first one in,” Jackson says. “He has an insatiable appetite in different ways.”

While actors such as Jamie Bell (who voices Tintin) wore performance-capture helmets and bodysuits as Spielberg filmed them in the large camera-laden room called “The Volume,” a small wire-frame fox terrier usually stood in for the rambunctious Snowy and was moved around by a prop guy.

“He would constantly be running around after me with this thing,” Bell says. “I think he lost like 20 pounds making the movie.”

Jackson sees Snowy the same as any of the human actors. “He doesn’t talk but he interacts with the characters in a way that’s dog-like but super-intelligent, with a very mischievous sense of humor as well.”

“He does things that no dog could ever possibly do. He does the things that you dream your dog would do if he could somehow become a little more human.”

Gannett News Service