Principal photography began in January 2009 and finished that July, with a combination of voice acting, motion capture and traditional computer animation being used.

The film received positive reviews from critics, who praised the motion-capture animation, the faithful character designs, visual effects, action sequences, cast performances and musical score.

In a post-war Brussels, while browsing in an outdoor market with his pet dog Snowy, young journalist Tintin purchases a model of a ship known as the Unicorn.

Tintin, Haddock and Snowy eventually outrun the crew, escape from the Karaboudjan in a lifeboat, and attempt to use a second one to fake their deaths, but Sakharine sees through the ruse and sends a seaplane to find and capture them.

[19] Spielberg and his production partner Kathleen Kennedy of Amblin Entertainment were scheduled to meet with Hergé in 1983 while filming Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in London.

Claude Berri and Roman Polanski became interested in filming the property, while Warner Bros. Pictures negotiated for the rights, but they could not guarantee the "creative integrity" that the Foundation found in Spielberg.

[24] In 2004, French magazine Capital reported Spielberg was intending a trilogy based on The Secret of the Unicorn / Red Rackham's Treasure, The Seven Crystal Balls / Prisoners of the Sun and The Blue Lotus / Tintin in Tibet.

[25] By then, Spielberg had reverted to his idea of a live-action adaptation and called Peter Jackson to ask if Weta Digital would create a computer-generated Snowy.

[26] A week of filming took place in November 2006 in Playa Vista, Los Angeles on the stage where James Cameron shot Avatar.

[31] An official announcement about the collaboration was made in May 2007, although both filmmakers had to wait to film it: Spielberg was preparing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull while Jackson was planning The Lovely Bones.

Jackson felt the former's story "wasn't really robust enough to sustain a feature film", but the filmmakers still included elements from the comic, such as the Karaboudjan and the first meeting of Tintin and Haddock.

[13] However, that August (a month before principal photography would have begun), Universal turned down their option to co-produce due to the poor box office performances of recent motion-captured animated films such as Monster House and Beowulf, as well as Spielberg and Jackson's request for a combined 30% of the gross.

To improve the quality of the indoor lighting nuances, Weta Digital and NVIDIA developed a piece of ray tracing software called PantaRay, which requires 100 to 1,000 times more computation than traditional shadow-map based solutions.

The website's consensus reads: "Drawing deep from the classic Raiders of the Lost Ark playbook, Steven Spielberg has crafted another spirited, thrilling adventure in the form of Tintin.

[63] Amy Biancolli of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: "Such are the timeless joys of the books (and now the movie), this sparkling absurdity and knack for buckling swash under the worst of circumstances.

[65] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone also gave the film three and a half stars out of four and wrote: "The movie comes at you in a whoosh, like a volcano of creative ideas in full eruption.

Presented as the first part of a trilogy produced by Spielberg and Peter Jackson, The Adventures of Tintin hits home for the kid in all of us who wants to bust out and run free".

[66] Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times said: "Think of The Adventures of Tintin as a song of innocence and experience, able to combine a sweet sense of childlike wonder and pureness of heart with the most worldly and sophisticated of modern technology.

[67] Richard Corliss of Time wrote: "Motion capture, which transforms actors into cartoon characters in a vividly animated landscape, is the technique Spielberg has been waiting for—the Christmas gift … that he's dreamed of since his movie childhood".

[68] Jordan Mintzer of The Hollywood Reporter was also very positive about the film, describing it as "a good ol' fashioned adventure flick that hearkens back to the filmmaker's action-packed, tongue-in-cheek swashbucklers of the 1980s.

[71] Leslie Felperin of Variety wrote: "Clearly rejuvenated by his collaboration with producer Peter Jackson, and blessed with a smart script and the best craftsmanship money can buy, Spielberg has fashioned a whiz-bang thrill ride that's largely faithful to the wholesome spirit of his source but still appealing to younger, Tintin-challenged auds".

[50] The Guardian's Xan Brooks gave the film two stars out of five, stating: "While the big set pieces are often exuberantly handled, the human details are sorely wanting.

[73] Blog Critics writer Ross Miller said: "Author Hergé's wonderfully bold and diverse array of characters are a mixed bag when it comes to how they've been translated to the big-screen" and that while the mystery might be "perfectly serviceable for film ... the execution of it at times feels languid and stodgy, like it's stumbling along from one eye-catching setpiece to the next".

The themes of fakeness and phoniness and counterfeit that drive many of the original plots are replaced in the film with messages that feel "as though we have wandered into a seminar on monetisation through self-empowerment … It's like making a biopic of Nietzsche that depicts him as a born-again Christian, or of Gandhi as a trigger-happy Rambo blasting his way through the Raj".

[76] Manohla Dargis, one of the chief critics of The New York Times, called the movie "a marvel of gee-wizardry and a night's entertainment that can feel like a lifetime".

Dargis noted that Tintin's appearance in the film "resembled Hergé's creation, yet was eerily different as if, like Pinocchio, his transformation into human form had been prematurely interrupted".

Another major fault in the film, Dargis opines, is how it is overworked; she writes that there is "hardly a moment of downtime, a chance to catch your breath or contemplate the tension between the animated Expressionism and the photo-realist flourishes".

In Belgium, Tintin's country of origin, the film made $520,000, while France provided $4.6 million, a number higher than other similar Wednesday debuts.

[122] By the time The Secret of the Unicorn was released, Spielberg said the book that would form the sequel had been chosen and that the Thomson and Thompson detectives would "have a much bigger role".

[129] In December 2014, when Jackson was asked if the Tintin sequel would be his next project after The Hobbit trilogy, he said that it would be made "at some point soon", but he added that he wanted to direct two New Zealand films before that.