Hergé (Georges Remi, 1907-1983), the Brussels author of Tintin, wanted his comic books to be “films on paper”. Cinema used to have an enormous influence on his way of storytelling. It was a lifelong dream of his to see a motion picture made of the comic, and several attempts were made. A first one, with puppets, came immediately after the Second World War, and 15 years later two live-action films were produced.
Yet Tintin and the Secret of the Golden Fleece (1961) and Tintin and the Blue Oranges (1964) were not really to Hergé’s taste. He had higher expectations of the two animated films that were due several years later, Tintin and the Temple of the Sun and Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, made by the Belvision Studios in Brussels.
Belvision was the first great animation film studio in Brussels and was part of the same company as the weekly Journal de Tintin, property of publisher Raymond Leblanc. It was Karel Van Milleghem, editor-in-chief of Kuifje, the Flemish version of the Tintin weekly, who had the idea to start working in animation. “After a long, sleepless night thinking about it,” Leblanc said in 2006, “I thought: Why not? Walt Disney began by making animated films and later switched to comics. Why shouldn’t we do it the other way around?”
The newly created studio began in 1956 with a series for Flemish television of the popular comic book characters Suske en Wiske and would later produce feature films of Lucky Luke, The Smurfs, Astérix and Tintin. From the 1970s onwards, Belvision mainly worked for television and publicity. Making good animated films proved to be expensive, difficult and risky.
“Van Milleghem had a few ideas that everybody believed in,” says Guy Dessicy, who worked as an assistant to both Hergé and Leblanc. “But he thought that making an animated film was easy: You take a couple of drawings, you show the one after the other, and that would make a film.”
But it turned out not to be that easy. “It was actually very difficult to make a good film, and it took a lot of people to do it. And a lot of money, of course.”
Leblanc wanted to become “a kind of European Disney”, Dessicy says. “He wanted to have something that he could call his own. The Tintin weekly was his, but everybody associated it with Hergé. I think that this was on his mind when he invested so much time and money in Belvision.”
The first of the Belvision films, Tintin and the Temple of the Sun (based on two of the albums), was a success and received praise from the critics – mainly thanks to the score, written and performed by Jacques Brel and his musical director François Rauber. Hergé was only involved from a distance, but he had asked his assistant, Antwerp-born Bob De Moor, to draw the decors for the film. “Those were very busy times for my father,” remembers his son Johan De Moor. “He used to bring home these big drawings for the decors. He sat there drawing at the table all evening long while family life went on.”
For the second film, Tintin and the Lake of Sharks, comic artist Greg (pseudonym of Michel Régnier) wrote the script, not based on any of the Tintin books that had been published. Greg was the editor-inchief of the Tintin weekly and wrote the scripts for most of the stories published in the magazine. The story was in the spirit of Hergé’s own, but the critics weren’t very kind. The film would turn out to be the last about Tintin, until now.
Hergé had always been a great fan of Steven Spielberg and hoped that one day, he would be willing to make a Tintin film. Today, after 30 years of negotiating, his dream seems to have come true with the release of The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn.
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