Alcoholism as humour

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I feel that, while the alcoholism may have been portrayed in a humorous way, it was portrayed in as realistic a fashion, if not more so, then the rest of the events in the movie. Honestly the movie makes light of violence as well, and it is certainly not funny in real life when someone is threatened or shot at. That is the beautiful thing about movies.....they allow situations that in real life would be terrible, to be portrayed in any fashion the director wants. I watch movies to enjoy them, not look for examples of how to behave, or things to become offended at. And think of it this way.....if they had left the character the same, but without the alcohol, it would set an even worse example in behavior.

Seriously... what group of people doesn't get made fun of? Alcoholics, drug addicts, handicapped/mentally ill people, blondes, red heads, fat people, lawyers, cops, black people, American people, French people, Chinese people, married people, uneducated people, religious people etc etc.

There is just no getting everything right all the time, one just has to have the sense to distinguish between the humor and the real life problem...

"Why do grapes bob up and down in a glass of soda? -No, really. I wanna know!"

So what else would you have Haddock do? Alcoholism is such a large part of his character in the comics. You change such a fundamental aspect of him, and even more people would complain. It's definitely different from leaving out some racist undertones that were in the source material, which is relatively small compared to changing what Haddock was all about.

I agree with what someone else said about how family films these days are so politically correct and tame. Remember when Dumbo got drunk? When Bacchus played in wine in Fantasia? When Pinocchio smoked and shot billiards? How about the depicted drug use in Alice in Wonderland? Nothing wrong with some drunken humor in Tintin.

Belching into the gas tank to keep the plane flying = awesome.

------Jesus loves you, but only as a friend.------

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To the OP:

I thought they balanced this really well to be honest. There were two behaviours from Haddock: just being drunk and having his drinking cause actual problems. Drunken ranting is a sign of excess but not of harmful drinking. All his comedy time came when he was being harmlessly ridiculous. Drunken ranting IS funny. Even with a family member who I know is an alcoholic, if they are railing but it's not causing a problem right then (they're not picking a fight etc) and they say something funny, I don't feel like a bad person for being amused.

I think that when he showed signs of drinking being a disease, Tintin actually gets pretty annoyed with him. They might make the viewer smirk because of the skewed logic (burning the oars to stay warm) but it's usually a catalyst to more adventure and Tintin acts disgusted, never amused. They were never hahaha scenes for me.

I also thought it was interesting that even though Tintin's clearly disapproving of his drinking ("They knobbled me on the head in the garden. See, there was bottle..." "there always is with you," "Not like that!" "I can smell it on you.") he never sidelines him with a label of "useless drunk". I think that would have been much worse. I think Tintin continued to put a lot of faith into Haddock and it paid off towards the end.