UPDATE: An American one-sheet for the film has also debuted at Ain't It Cool. Check it out below and click on it for their super-large version. It's darker than the English one but just as well-constructed and intriguing.

With the box office failure of Mars Needs Moms and Disney's subsequent cancellation of Robert Zemeckis's Yellow Submarine remake, the future for motion-capture animation looks a little uncertain. But if anyone is going to make the format work it's Steven Spielberg, and this December he's giving it a shot with The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn. The movie has yet to be all that heavily promoted over here, both thanks to the fact that Tintin-- a comic character drawn by Belgian artist Herge-- isn't as iconic in the United States as in Europe, and probably also because DreamWorks is still figuring out how to sell audiences on yet another mo-cap film.

Things are off to a good start, though, with the first poster for the film that debuted at Empire; you can see it below and click on it for the larger version over there. Showing the main character, played by Jamie Bell, in silhouette is a good call, since faces are the trickiest part of mo-cap to sell Otherwise it's pure old-fashioned elegance and color, promising adventure and literal globetrotting and a boy and his trusty dog. And get a load of that credits bar-- not only is it Spielberg, of course, but the film is written by Sherlock creator Steven Moffat, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director Edgar Wright and Attack the Block director Joe Cornish. If that's not an embarrassment of talent I don't know what is.

One question I have, though-- the title Secret of the Unicorn is missing from the poster, though included in Empire's write-up of the poster. Does that mean they're ditching it, or at least downplaying it? Keep an eye on marketing materials from here out to see if there will be a change there.