At some point as I sat watching “The Adventures of Tintin,” I realized what a weird brand of humor I was raised on. Think of the “Rock Bottom” episode in “Spongebob Squarepants.” Or any episode of “Spongebob.” Or the very concept of a talking sponge…that wears pants…and lives in a pineapple.

 

In comparison, “Tintin” seems impossibly wholesome. Based on a series of comic books that first appeared in 1929, it follows, well, the adventures of a freckly red-headed kid named Tintin and his sidekick terrier, Snowy. In this particular episode, directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, he’s on a treasure hunt for a sunken ship, though a lot of that involves just getting the three little slips of paper the coordinates are written on.

 

After encountering an icy man named Sakharine, the film’s haughty, cold-eyed villain, Tintin eventually crosses path with Captain Haddock, the comic book’s other main character. Whiskey-guzzling, drunkenly babbling and temperamental, Haddock is the sarcastic antidote to Tintin’s wholesome heroism. But the film just didn’t get the chemistry quite right; Tintin and Haddock are so starkly different that the former comes across as an off-putting know-it-all and the latter as an exhaustingly immature buffoon. Originally, Tintin’s age was undisclosed, but he was thought to be in his early twenties. No doubt to appeal to its target demographic, the film makes it clear he’s no older than sixteen. Still, he lives in his own London flat, having already become famous for his precocious crime-solving abilities, and talks with the self-assurance of a young Neil Patrick Harris. It’s actually refreshing that the filmmakers didn’t infantilize their young protagonist, but it makes it difficult for the audience to find a soft spot to share in his struggle. It also bungles Haddock’s role as comic relief: Tintin’s (often) humorless cockiness casts his silly, bumbling companion in a patronizing light. The immaculate and self-asserting young man, who’s evidently eschewed immaturity, leaves us with little patience for a hedonistic, misbehaving adult.

 

The action and visuals, on the other hand, are quite masterful. Characters’ faces are illustrated with a keen realism. The expansive scenes of Bagghar, a fictional Moroccan port town, are beautifully colored and evoke the same love for the exotic and worldly as the Indiana Jones films. The action is swift, with little pause for dialogue or hardship, to the point that I sometimes felt I was witnessing a video game. At times it seemed the characters were just pawns in a frenzy of booms and bangs, or rather, excuses to bring to life this nostalgic, romanticized vision of exploration.

 

There’s a sweet, understated humor here that is undeniably lovable at times, the kind that reminds me of “Wallace and Gromit” (it was a mix of that and “Spongebob”). Thomson and Thompson, two endearingly incompetent detectives, banter unwittingly while the criminals get away and suffer their share of pratfalls. A pickpocket, it turns out, just has a helpless love of wallets.

 

Yet “Tintin,” in spite of its whimsical veneer, is darker than it seems. Along with Haddock’s affection for whiskey, a man is gunned down–blood visible–and the characters, like Tintin, are endowed with a cold intellectualism most cartoons nowadays totally forgo; Sakharine could pass for the villain in “Die Hard.” That too was refreshing against today’s cornucopia of dumbed-down animated features, whose M.O. is written in cheap punch lines. Still, it all comes back to Tintin, the film’s unquestionable center. And still, he’s got it all under control–and if he doesn’t, he’s still playing father to the insufferable Haddock. He doesn’t have to lose his precocious wit, but if only the filmmakers had imbued him with some more vulnerability, a greater sense of struggle. Instead, I found myself longing for the unrequited tug between father and son in “Finding Nemo.” Even the love story of Shrek and Fiona. There’s a lot of energetic imagery and artfully interpreted characters to breathe life into this indulgently nostalgic whirlwind, but not enough heart at its center to let me slip into the shoes of its adventurer. As the credits rolled I asked my 13-year-old cousin how she liked it. She shrugged.

 

It struck me that a movie, crafted by truly gifted storytellers who know how to create epic emotional journeys, would inspire such a dispassionate reaction. A movie like this deserves to be experienced through a melody of bated breaths and wide, expectant eyes; an adventure so spirited, so lovingly wrought, should also be affecting, right? I wonder, had it just let its self-possessed protagonist stray more deeply into doubt and insecurity along the way, whether it could have been.