Very rarely do we bring a movie into the house that every member of the family enjoys.

My husband rented “The Adventures of Tin Tin” for the kids, and slipped it in after dinner tonight.  We were only supposed to watch a few minutes, and then get to our chores.  Well, lets just say the chores never happened.  The workout my husband wanted to do didn’t happen either.  Nor did my writing time.

Honestly, I was not interested at all at first.  I believe (I may be wrong) that this was a British TV series at one time.  I’ve seen remakes before, and have rarely been impressed.

This, however, was well-written, exciting, and visually stunning.

I found myself watching the movie and thinking, “How would I even write that?”  I think the answer is, that I couldn’t.  I’m not sure anyone could.  There was just too much action in this movie to be condensed down into a book.  This was conceived to be on the screen, and then bought to life with some of the best animation I’ve ever seen.  Several times I found myself forgetting that it was animated… even when looking at the characters.  Simply breathtaking.

The story is well-plotted and flows magically from one high-action scene to the next with not much more than a three minute pause to take a breath.  It never feels forced.   It just WORKS.

Every character is well defined, and you care about them.  There is a set of Keystone-Like cops that are there strictly for comic relief.  My husband and I agreed that they did not need to be there, but we figured that they were probably characters in the original series that die-hards would have missed if they were not there.  Their appearances are kept to a minimum, though, and were not over-bearing.

Overall, this was a fantastic pick for my family.

Comments after the movie:

My Eleven Year Old:  “I can’t believe how good that was.”

My Eight Year old:  “Did you see that?  When he did this, and that guy got ‘em back, and then he…”  (acting out everything the whole time)

My Six Year Old:  Fell off the couch and pretended to faint it was so good.

My Husband:  “That was one of the best action movies I’ve seen since Indiana Jones!  We need to buy this in HD so we can watch it in the Home Theater.”  (We started in it out regular living room.  If we knew what we were in for, we probably would have set ourselves up in the basement)

Me?  I’m dumfounded at the originality.  I mean, who would have ever thought to have two people dueling with cranes.  Yes, I said CRANES.  And the thing with the Plane?  We were all shouting at the screen.  What a hoot… It just didn’t stop.

To do these action scenes justice, each one of them would have taken 50 pages of text in a novel, and there were more action scenes than I could spit back into this article.

Oh yeah, super positive message at the end as well.

Yes, it’s open for a sequel, and for the first time ever all my kids said, without prompt, “When can we see the next one?”

Well, Peter Jackson and Stephen Spielberg… well done.

So, when is the next one?