“My memory isn’t the way it used to be.”
“How was it?”
“I’ve forgotten.”

The Adventures of Tintin seems to have been undertaken with the least amount of affectation that Steven Spielberg has brought to a project since, I don’t know, Raiders of the Lost Ark? In his first animated feature, the directors brings to life the dauntless hero of Belgian cartoonist Hergé’s beloved comic serials, drawing from three of the original stories to concoct a rip-roaring, unadulterated adventure.

Spielberg has added numerous hats to his collection over the years, to varying success—the armchair philosopher, the insightful historical dramatist, the political and social commentator—but he’s at his best when he’s aiming his masterful skills as a visual storyteller at a tale of escapist pleasure.

Here we have the young Tintin (Jamie Bell) getting caught up in a globetrotting treasure hunt alongside nincompoop detectives Thomson and Thompson (Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), perpetually soused Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), and cunningly villainous Sakharine (Daniel Craig); a headlong dash through hails of gunfire, swashbuckling, hidden clues, pirate ships, army tanks, plane crashes, desert mirages, and dueling shipyard cranes. Oh and we can’t forget Tintin’s loyal fox terrier Snowy, who benefits the most from the animated presentation, taking on the anthropomorphic quality he exhibits in the comics as he tries to wordlessly communicate with his master.

Though Spielberg frames many of his scenes the same as he would in a live-action film (extensively utilizing the much-maligned motion capture technology that Robert Zemeckis had been fiddling with on full productions for about a decade), he does try out a few tricks that the animated medium affords him—wild cross-dissolved match cuts, zooms through the reflections on glasses or bubbles or swords to the scene beneath, extravagant floating camera chase sequences without cuts. You can almost sense the director playing with the possibilities that come with embracing the technology.

It’s a good deal more sophisticated than your run-of-the-mill animated adventure and a lot funnier too. The jovial tone and slapstick comedy are sustained throughout, and I can only imagine the immense pleasure with which a childhood version of myself would have beheld such a rollicking and uproarious film. Even so, this is not a children’s movie but a true family-friendly adventure, complete with a subtle adult joke about “animal husbandry” and references to pop culture, including Sherlock Holmes and Spielberg’s own Jaws.