A Tribute to Winsor McCay (Fri., 8 p.m., $8, Franklin Institute) If Winsor McCay didn't invent the animated film, he revolutionized it literally single-handed. Beginning in 1909, McCay, then one of the most popular cartoonists in the country, drew thousands of frames without assistants or in-betweeners, rapidly establishing that animation could be a means of expression and not just a sideshow novelty. John Canemaker, the McCay authority who will present Friday night's program, calls McCay's films "a high standard for character animation, not to be surpassed until the Golden Era of the Walt Disney studio in the 1930s." Moving in a decade from innocuous test footage of Little Nemo characters to unsettlingly realistic footage of the sinking of the Lusitania, McCay transformed animation on an artistic and technical level, leaving a brief oeuvre as jaw-dropping as it is significant.

Tintin and I (Tue., 10 p.m., PBS stations) In the U.S., comic books are a luxury of childhood, to be outgrown (or nostalgically indulged) later in life. But in Europe, comics are a serious art form, which accounts for the sober tone of Anders Østergaard's engrossing documentary. Drawing on the audio tapes and present-day reminiscences of Numa Sadoul, who as a 20-year-old student scored a four-day interview with the aging Hergé, Tintin and I reveals the tortured, politically murky artist behind the lighthearted adventure strips. According to Hergé, whose real name was Remy Girard (the pen name is phonetically derived from his initials), Tintin in Tibet's snowy backdrop reflected a "longing for purity," while the shrewish opera singer in The Castafiore Emerald was an unconscious approximation of his soon-to-be ex-wife. This is basic literary criticism, and perhaps unworthy of the movie's portentousness. But it's fascinating to see such tools applied to works whose primary charm seems to be that they are blissfully free of subtext—escapist in the best sense of the word.

Tintin and I

Even Hergé's most fantastic strips, Østergaard's talking heads argue, have their roots in the real world, or at least a flight from it. Born in the pages of a right-wing Catholic newspaper whose editor openly admired Mussolini, Tintin jumped ship to a Nazi-controlled French paper during the occupation, and Hergé, whose earliest strips had argued for Belgian occupation in the Congo, took refuge in a world of fantasy (albeit one whose backgrounds were as obsessively researched and detailed as ever). The movie never quite cracks the nut of Hergé's political sympathies, although one commentator asserts that around the outbreak of WWII, Hergé stops identifying with Tintin, the adventurous reporter, and starts identifying with the foul-mouthed, foul-tempered Captain Haddock, who "just wants the world to leave him alone."

In plumbing the depths of Hergé's art, Tintin and I sometimes neglects its surface; one wishes for a little of the wit and humor that make the Tintin comics such an addictive delight. After all, it's not as if Hergé was the first to produce great art for a young audience while suffering the pangs of self-doubt. (Try reading an interview with Charles Schulz sometime.) But anyone who's ever repeated one of Captain Haddock's convoluted curses would be a bald-headed budgerigar to skip it. (Note: Although the film airs Tuesday night on most PBS stations, WHYY's broadcast is scheduled for July 15 at 11:40 p.m.)

(sam@citypaper.net)