Broken Frontier

Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson will direct and produce three fully digital 3-D back-to-back features based on Hergé’s classic Belgian character, Tintin for DreamWorks Animation.

As Spielberg told Variety , "Herge'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 added that while WETA is staying true to the source material, they’re not making the characters look too cartoonish.  "Xe'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 Hergé people!"

The announcement follows hot on the heels of Jackson’s other DreamWorks project announcement, Lovely Bones, and it is widely assumed that the Tintin deal led Jackson to make DreamWorks the home for his adaptation of Alice Sebold's epic.

The director’s New Zealand-based company WETA Digital, the digital effects house behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, has already produced a 20-minute test reel bringing Hergé’s characters to life.

Spielberg and Jackson have selected three adventures from Hergé’s 23 books published between 1929 and 1976 and will each direct at least one film, but the name of the third director has yet to be unveiled.

Tintin’s adventures have been translated into 50 languages, with over 200 million copies sold and more than 2 million new readers each year. The announcement of the deal comes withing days of the 100th anniversary of Herge’s birth, May 22, 1907.