When Michael Morpurgo's War Horse opened at the National Theatre in 2007, the critics agreed that the star of the show was the life-sized puppet in the title role.
Now Steven Spielberg, whose eagerly-awaited film version of the story starring Emily Watson and Benedict Cumberbatch opens this Christmas, has admitted that the real horses he used in his film had a hard act to follow.
Tom Morris, who co-directed the stage hit with Marianne Elliott, which was enjoyed by, among others, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, told me that the great director had voiced his concerns over a lunch.
"We didn't have any input into the film, but we saw Mr Spielberg and he was a straightforward and very nice man," says Morris. "He was telling us that, when they were in the middle of filming, he was quite frustrated as the real horses weren't nearly as expressive as the puppets. They wouldn't do what you wanted them to do."
Tim Walker, The Telegraph, 4th July 2011.
I made this video out of clips I took at the Circus Boerhaave exhibition at the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden, Netherlands. It features automata and toys made by the incredible Cabaret Mechanical Theatre in a beautifully arranged, carnivalesque setting. With a Tom Waits soundtrack, I've probably made it seem more malevolent, less delightful than the show actually is, but it is situated in the middle of a museum of science and anatomy, and the specimen jars, dim lighting and medical instruments had put me in a macabre mood.
The makers of Sesame Street say characters Bert and Ernie will not marry in a same-sex ceremony despite an online petition calling for the union.
Campaigners say the best friends should marry as a way to encourage tolerance of gay people.
Nearly 7,000 have signed the petition, with more than 3,000 joining a Bert and Ernie Get Married Facebook page.
A statement from the show's makers said: "They remain puppets and do not have a sexual orientation."
But they conceded that the pair are "male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics".
The confirmed bachelors have lived together for 40 years and sleep in the same bedroom, albeit in single beds.
"Bert and Ernie are best friends," the statement from Sesame Workshop added. "They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves.
The online petition states: "We are not asking that Sesame Street do anything crude or disrespectful," adding, "It can be done in a tasteful way. Let us teach tolerance of those that are different."
[Originally posted at Spectacular Attractions.]
There's a scene towards the end of Tarsem's The Fall, an exhaustingly aestheticised excursus on mythology and storytelling, when one of the lead characters (the incredible Catinca Untaru, giving surely one of the most natural and riveting performances by a child on film) suffers a head injury. The operation she undergoes is represented in stop-motion animation, a fluttering montage of cowled doctors, dolls and opened skulls.
Immediately, I assumed this was the work of the Brothers Quay, who produced a sequence for Julie Taymor's Frida, also representing the woozy trauma of major surgery, using puppets to portray the hallucinatory in/out-of-body sensations of heavy sedation, extreme pain and semi-consciousness after Frida Kahlo (Salma Hayek) is injured in a road accident:
The sequence from The Fall is credited to Christophe and Wolfgang Lauenstein, twin animators from Germany, and being a suspicious chap prone to the charms of even the tiniest of conspiracy theories, I presumed that this was a pseudonym for the Quays. There couldn't be two sets of twin brothers working in stop-motion, surely?
Turns out I was wrong. Don't worry, I'm used to it. There really are two sets of stop-motion twins out there, though closer inspection of the Lauensteins' back catalogue reveals their work to be considerably cuddlier than the Quays. Their short film Balance won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1989. Accessible allegory abounds:
Honourable mentions must go to the Chiodo Brothers, sibling puppeteers of the Critters films, Team America and a load of others. See their stop-motion showreel here. Also the Bolex Brothers, makers of The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, though they're not actually brothers at all. I once met the Quay Brothers, and found them to be entirely personable (that's not a euphemism, and there's no "but" coming), but (oops!) there is something undeniably fascinating about the closeness of their relationship, the way they communicate with great empathic sensitivity; that's not exclusive to twins, but it does chime with the image we tend to have of stop-motion animators practising an art that requires preternaturally intense focus and a seemingly occult power to make dead matter come to life. That's certainly an air that has formed around the Quays, while the resolute gravity of their work has siphoned off any residual sense that there might be some fraternal japery during their sessions around the animating table. The silly superstitions around telepathic twins, confusing close interpersonal bonds with psychic ability, just feed the mystique about the powers of incarnation wielded by animators.
To be a bunraku puppeteer means to spend one’s whole life working in shadow. From the time he enter as an apprentice at the age of 10 or 12 or 13, it takes him 10 or 15 years just to leanr to operate the puppet’s feet properly. First he spends two to four years doing odd jobs backstage, and handing up small props, then he spends up to 10 years doing just feet. After that, he spends five to 10 years operating the left hand. During this whole time, he learns to be invisible: wearing the kuroko’s black costume and hood, stifling his coughs and sneezes. When he stops work and goes home, no one recognises his artistry, even though he has reached the age when most men have a wife and family. A bunraku puppeteer spends his whole life in shadow.
Every pose, every turn or locomotion by a body, by a puppet, is important: nothing can be left to chance. The puppet player is, therefore, faced with a dilemma. Convincing body movement grows outwardly from the body's centre. But the puppet's movements emanate in actual fact from the manipulation technique, which is most frequently situated some distance from the puppet's centre. If this discrepancy is revealed through the puppet player's performance, the character loses its credibility. The problem must be bridged by creating an illusion, which causes different degrees of difficulty, depending on the type of theatre puppet used.
Like a person, a puppet needs balance. The marionette, for example, in its entirety, is a pendulum. It moves its parts according to the same principle as a pendulum. One need only lift a marionette off the floor and operate it in the air to verify this. One of the ways that the pendulum effect is counteracted is by maintaining a correct balance with relation to the floor. The puppet player finds a thousand different gimmicks to prevent the creation of pendulum motions, which threaten to destroy his precision. The problem is particularly evident in the figure's arms and legs. Dangling arms and swinging heads make poor marionette performance easily recognisable.In short, one may speak of two techniques for manipulating marionettes: 'the string-pulling technique' and 'the centrally-controlled technique'. The string-pulling technique begins at the extreme ends of the strings, while the centrally-controlled technique begins at the centre of the body. To be more accurate, the performance creates the illusion that the movement begins there, but in reality it arises far away from there, that is, within the puppet player himself.
One should not make the figure execute any movements that the human body is incapable of executing. This may sound like blasphemy. After all, the puppet is not human. Puppets can naturally do only what puppets are capable of doing; they are, in the literal sense of the word, fantastic, and are capable of executing fantastic movements and depicting worlds, characters, feelings and thoughts that are difficult and, at times, even impossible for live actors to portray convincingly. Flying, floating, defying the forces of gravity, portraying a trance or a dream-like state, and much more.But when a figure represents a human being and is intended to portray human behaviour in a convincing manner, one should try to make it authentic, true-to-life, with movements corresponding to those natural to human beings.Technique can be learned in the puppet-maker's workshop. Many puppet players today lack training as puppet-makers. They encounter the finished figure as an instrument on the stage when rehearsals begin. This is a handicap. The person who has created his own figure, or has at least participated in constructing it, develops a much deeper understanding of the instrument's resources at the source, and, with a different insight, can influence and improve the puppet himself.I foresee a future marionette theatre in which all those involved in a production work together from the planning stage and during the entire production: puppet-makers, set builders, technicians, players, director, scene-designer. Such collective involvement in a production would ensure that the long theoretical and practical preparatory work would correspond with the material which developed subsequently, when the ensemble began rehearsing.
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The sound track is a ventriloquist who, by moving his dummy (the image) in time with the words he secretly speaks, creates the illusion that the words are produced by the dummy/image whereas in fact the dummy/image is actually created in order to disguise the source of the sound. Far from being subservient to the image, the sound track uses the illusion of subservience to serve its own ends.[...]Portraying moving lips on the screen convinces us that the individual thus portrayed – and not the loudspeaker – has spoken the words we have heard. The redundancy of the image – seeing the ‘speaker’ while we hear ‘his’ words – thus serves a double purpose. By creating a new myth of origins, it displaces our attention 1) from the technological, mechanical, and thus industrial status of the cinema, and 2) from the scandalous fact that sound films begin as language – the screenwriter’s – and not as pure image.
'Can puppets be really “real”? Should we try to fool the public with a form of animated taxidermy? Are Disney’s audioanimatronic figures the wave of the future? Will puppeteers become obsolete? If puppets can look “perfect for the part” should we cast them in vehicles created for human performers? […] Reality and fantasy are opposite ends of a see-saw; humans on one end, puppets on the other. They are beyond compare when they stick to what they do best – being themselves. Puppets can no more pass for humans than people can portray Pinocchio. Seeing puppets and humans simultaneously, side-by-side, heightens the contrast in size, shape, anatomy and proportion. […] When a puppeteer admits to being a sensitive, vulnerable human and channels emotions through the puppet, audiences will sense the change. Apathy toward puppets will turn to empathy. The humanity of the puppeteer must seek the humanity of the audience so they can jointly build a meaningful experience together. The human-object-human trio with a passionate need for scaling the heights will find their reward in exaltation.'
Hatsune Miku is a Japanese virtual idol, an artificial, puppetised performance with two key components: visually, there is the motion-captured character animation, and also the synthesised vocals that complete the act. One might ask what the crowd are cheering for? Is it admiration for the technology, or are they suspending disbelief and indulging in the fantasy that this is a real live girl? It's probably a combination of both, which is why I would incorporate this kind of virtual performance under the banner of 'puppetry': the technicians and animators have constructed a character, but they still need the audience to be complicit in completing the temporary illusion that it is alive with personality.
The World is Mine is, in my opinion, Hatsune Miku's best track; this is not especially distinguished pop music, but also noteworthy is the song The Disappearance of Hatsune, which makes a point of her virtuality:
