Scholars of Tintin go by many names. There are Tintinophiles, Tintinolators, and Tintinites—that last one sounds like a marauding North African army from the Middle Ages—and there’s also a group that call themselves Hergélogues (after author-illustrator Hergé, in case that isn’t obvious).

For the record, actor Jamie Bell—who stars in the new movie about the boyish reporter with the indomitable cowlick—considers himself “a Tintinologist under the tutelage of Michael Farr”.

“In preparation for the character, I trawled through the books, trying to figure out who this guy is,” Bell tells the Straight, calling from his hotel room in Toronto. “Like, ‘Who is Tintin?’ It’s a question that Hergé just didn’t want to answer for some reason. And I met Michael afterwards—he’s written these amazing books about the evolution of Tintin and Hergé as an artist—and I said, ‘Your books gave me the answer I was looking for, which was that you can’t actually answer that question.’ That’s the riddle. That’s the mystery of the whole thing. So I would consider myself a Tintinologist, even though a true Tintinologist would say, ‘I don’t know who Tintin is and I wouldn’t be able to tell you.’ ”

And with that slightly convoluted answer, Bell has, hopefully, reassured the faithful that The Adventures of Tintin remains faithful to Hergé’s creation. Indeed, director Steven Spielberg was evidently sensitive enough to the books’ devotees that he put his motion-capture, 3-D adaptation on an unusual release schedule, fanning out across Europe, Latin America, and India before bringing the film to North America.

Bell has been accompanying the film ever since it premiered in Brussels and Paris on the same day in October. “I feel like a statesman with this movie more than an actor,” he says “But I think Steven’s decision to release the film internationally was very much about supporting its European roots and its European sensibility. He wouldn’t have felt great about unleashing Tintin on American audiences first when it’s such a beloved European thing.”

Now that it’s here, fans on this side of the Atlantic are unlikely to be disappointed. Besides being truly marvellous entertainment (and a decisive comeback after the not-so-rollicking Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull ), The Adventures of Tintin is a dazzling visual achievement—groundbreaking, in fact.

“I think, for the actors, when you see it for the first time, you’re just like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s what it looks like?’ ” Bell says. “You’re taken away by the amount of detail. We made the film in one room, and yet it spans the Sahara Desert, the middle of the ocean, a Moroccan city, a European city…When I saw the movie, I was just in awe of the lush canvas that was behind the characters.”

And how about those characters? Spielberg and his team have arrived at a pleasing middle-ground between Hergé’s elegant simplicity (referenced in a cute joke in the first scene) and something pudgily lifelike, with actor Andy Serkis making a particularly robust (and sodden) Captain Haddock. After asking if we’ve caught Serkis’s “unbelievable” performance as Brit musician-icon Ian Dury in the film Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll (not yet!), Bell reverently declares: “I don’t think there’s anything Andy can’t do.” Naturally, given that Serkis advanced the artistry of mo-cap filmmaking immeasurably when he played Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies, Bell took notes.

“I think, for me, when you work with the masters of things, you don’t ask questions,” he says. “You just sort of watch and learn and you try and match them. But I would get distracted and just enjoy watching him perform.” Working with Spielberg made Bell’s workday doubly remarkable. Bear in mind that the actor, who shot to prominence as the dancing-guttersnipe lead in Billy Elliott, was born four years after Spielberg released ET.

“Oh, dude,” he begins, “seriously, as a kid I thought Steven was otherworldly. I thought he was kind of like Houdini. The first movie I saw in a theatre was Jurassic Park when I was eight years old, and I genuinely believed that dinosaurs lived. I thought, ‘Somewhere on this Earth, Steven Spielberg has raised a farm of dinosaurs.’ Between dinosaurs and boys flying on bicycles, he completely captured the excitement of my childhood. Spielberg was the adjective for that. So, yeah, I was a huge fan. The greatest moment in my career was getting the opportunity to work with this man who I’ve loved for so long.”

Bell, meanwhile, had already done time on the film King Kong with Spielberg’s creative partner, coproducer Peter Jackson. Beyond the look of the film, one of the most amazing things about The Adventures of Tintin is that it married two multibillion-dollar filmmaking titans without spilling any blood.

“You’d think it’d be a disaster, these two kind of massive egos coming together, but Steven would always say, ‘What does Peter think? What does Peter think?’ ” Bell recalls, explaining that Jackson would appear on-set from New Zealand via Skype. “He’d just kinda turn up bleary-eyed and all of a sudden you’d hear Peter’s voice going, ‘Hey, guys,’ over the loudspeaker. Simon Pegg and Nick Frost used to dare each other to just go and close the lid on the computer.”

Bell himself does a fine and subtle job of fleshing out the reckless courage and open-faced curiosity of Hergé’s hero, but then, he is a Tintinologist. And he’s quite clear on the roots of his own fascination with the character.

“The Tintin universe is a historical document of an ever-changing, effervescent, transitional European political landscape,” he begins, rather promisingly. “If you consider everything that was happening at the time Hergé was writing these books, from 1929 onwards, if you consider everything that happened on that European continent, politically, and how the character adapts, and how Europe enters into a new frontier, and Tintin’s right with them—I consider those Tintin books at that time to be a very important historical document.”

Well, that’s a hell of an answer.

“There you go; it’s not just a kid’s film,” he says. “No, it really is a kid’s film,” he adds, catching himself.

Like the best of the genre, let’s just agree that it’s both.

Watch the trailer for The Adventures of Tintin.