Snowy: The Original Stewie Griffin

One of the things I found most interesting about Tintin was a phenomenon I like to call the “Stewie Griffin effect.” For those of you who do not know, Stewie Griffin is a character on the popular animated TV show Family Guy. Stewie, voiced by Seth MacFarlane, is a highly intelligent baby who speaks perfect English, yet is only perceived by Brian, the English-speaking family dog, and the audience. While the other characters in the show are unable to understand Stewie, they often interact with him in ways that seem to suggest that they can, in fact, hear him. They frequently look at him while he is speaking, and wait for him to finish speaking before they interrupt. Similarly, in The Adventures of Tintin, Snowy’s speech is cleverly veiled by Hergé so that the reader, at first glance, believes Snowy to be a talking dog. A more thorough investigation, however, suggests that Snowy is just a regular dog whose thoughts have been translated for the reader. When looked at more closely, it becomes apparent that Snowy and Tintin never hold an actual conversation. Snowy’s lines tend to be simple observations on the current predicament, never truly engaging Tintin or even warranting a response. Furthermore, in scenes where Snowy is signaling Tintin from outside of the frame, his “speech” is reduced to simple barking rather than an exclamation of “hey Tintin, look at what I found!” Since Tintin is the focus of the frame, we can infer that we might be experiencing the world from his viewpoint, in which he hears Snowy barking like a regular (but brave) dog rather than speaking as a human would. This seems to suggest that Snowy speech, like that of Stewie Griffin, can only be perceived by specific characters as well as the reader.