BD: That alone is proof of the form that you chose.

SS: Yeah, the form allowed me virtual freedom I've not had up until Tintin in my career, and the virtual freedom to put anything in my imagination up on the screen with only taste holding me back from becoming a complete hog, so to speak.

Many of drawn comparisons to the Indiana Jones series.

BD: And the ability to go in and make last-minute lighting changes right up until the international release. What kind of changes did you make?

SS: No, sometimes I would convert a very bright, sunlit sequence to a very dark, film noir sequence, and we could do that in one phone conversation with the animators.

BD: And Raiders found its way in there too.

SS: I tried to keep the movie honest to the source material. I knew there would be some Raiders analogies because we sort of put the idea in the mind of the media when I first began telling people that I first came across Tintin when I read a Raiders of the Lost Ark review in one of the French magazines and it compared me to something called Tintin. And that's when I discovered what Tintin was -- I had never heard of Tintin before. And also the genre of the adventure movie has to follow certain principles, and those principles are the same for Gunga Din, the same for The Great Escape, the same for the Indiana Jones series, and the person that beat all of us to the punch in 1929 was Hergé.

Bill Desowitz is former senior editor of AWN and editor of VFXWorld. He has a new blog, Immersed in Movies (www.billdesowitz.com), and is currently writing a book about the evolution of James Bond from Connery to Craig, scheduled for publication next year, which is the 50th anniversary of the franchise.