Cinema’s Puppets

Puppetry has been an important part of cinema since the silent days. There are several types of puppetry and a variety of controls in their operation. There are physical manipulations such as hand and rod puppetry, but there are also more mechanical means such as cable control and servo motors. These last two are what blur the line between puppets and animatronics.

In Lili (1953), Leslie Caron plays a 16-year-old girl who gets entranced by a puppet show. When she should be working, she interacts with the puppets as if they are living, sentient beings. Even though Caron’s portrayal is to show her naivete, this captures an essential part of puppetry. Puppetry relies on the association of the real to make an audience believe in the movement of inanimate objects.

Since puppetry is a real time manipulation of objects, it can also loosely apply to the physical manipulation of people as seen in the Japanese film Double Suicide (1969).

Double Suicide is based on the bunraku play The Love Suicides at Amijima. While Masahiro Shinoda used actors in his story, the film begins with setting up a bunraku style puppet show and includes kuroku (stagehands dressed in all black) to manipulate the actors just as they would the puppets in a typical bunraku performance.

While most puppet related films had actors as the protagonists up to this point, once Jim Henson introduced his Muppets to the world puppets could take the spotlight. Henson was always at the technological forefront for what could be done in puppetry, but it wasn’t until The Dark Crystal (1982) that his innovation caught up enough to be able to make an all encompassing puppet-based world for film.

Undoubtedly, Jim Henson is the most influential figure in modern puppetry. The Dark Crystal became a cult classic after an initially poor run at the box office and Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is still a pre-eminent force in the creation of puppets and animatronics.

Beyond the influence of Henson, puppetry is otherwise relatively uncommon in films in the past few decades. There are a few great films that feature puppeteers such as The Double Life of Veronique (1991) or The Puppetmaster (1993), but the most influential would probably be Being John Malkovich (1999). While the puppetry is seemingly based in satire, it also accurately shows what it’s like to be a puppeteer.

As puppets and animatronics have mostly been replaced by CGI in film in the past twenty years, there are still some interesting puppet-based works, primarily in short films. Heather Henson’s Handmade Puppet Dreams is a great resource for filmmakers embracing puppetry.

One feature film to come out of Handmade Puppet Dreams is Yamasong: March of the Hollows (2017). A visually stunning film that shows the possibilities of the medium on a limited budget.

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