Motion-capture animation undeniably looks creepy. So the first few minutes of Tintin are uncomfortable, as you acclimate to these rubbery-yet-robotic humanoids that faintly resemble the characters in Hergé’s beloved kids’ adventure comics. But then the action starts in, and suddenly you’re having too much fun to pay attention to any underlying creepiness. And then some terrific performances by mo-cap stalwarts like the always-excellent Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock manage to pierce the layers of digital latex to imbue those dead eyes with a surprising amount of humanity.
Director Steven Spielberg and producer Peter Jackson smartly keep the adaptation very close to Hergé’s simple story structure—the boy reporter follows a clue to one exotic location, where he gets another clue that leads him to another exotic location—and the resulting movie is very similar in content to the glory days of Indiana Jones, with a kid-friendly lean in the direction of cartoonishness. (Refreshingly, this is the first Spielberg movie in years not to choke on its own daddy issues, leaving more room for adventure and imagination.)
Turns out, motion-capture is the perfect medium for Tintin: Line animation would feel too slight, and the action sequences—a brilliant chase through the narrow streets of a seaside town, an epic battle between two pirate ships—would look silly if they were live-action. With his camera unfettered by reality (it swoops in the air like a daredevil pilot), Spielberg turns out to be the Goldilocks of the uncanny valley—everything is just right. 
“Line animation would be too slight,” unless it had been done by Sylvain Chomet and his team of illustrators, (who brought us The Triplets of Belleville) which is what I was hoping for. But I’ll settle for this version, if only out of nostalgia for all those afternoons I spent as a boy, wandering the globe with Tintin and Snowy. Good review.
I could not disagree more. Herge’s characters were caricatures possessing disproportionate facial features that made sense as drawings – that they chose to make these characters realistic looking with these features falls smack-dab in the middle of the uncanny valley. All of them, even Tintin, look like they have some kind of birth defect. Why they didn’t chose to make the character more true to the comics, ala “The Incredibles,’ is beyond me. Yuck. Maybe a step up from Polar Express, but not much of one.
You didn’t mention if you saw it in 3D or not, but I’m assuming you would have mentioned something about it if you did. Anyone care to opine on which version to see?