An overview of cinematic puppet technology from marionettes to the digital age.
Since the Nineteenth Century, filmmakers turn to the special effect of puppetry to create fantastic creatures in the realm of film. Creature shops craft real-time, interactive entities, breathe life into them, and capture evidence of their existence. If films and television shows are windows into an imaginative, parallel Universe, puppets are manifest, tactile visitors from this creative world. Animation (despite stop-motion rigs technically being puppets), while picturing its own type of dream world, maintain the integrity of the reality-fantasy barrier. Animated characters live on the other side of a screen, but puppets occupy physical space, somewhere, in this reality.
The varying technologies used on film puppets demonstrate that puppets are as much belief in fantasy as they are the necessity of believability. Over the course of the Twentieth Century, filmmaking pushes the technological and creative bounds of puppetry. Puppets become more detailed and realistic while maintaining a credibility as a possibly credible life form. From simple rigs to computer-driven machines, the technology of puppets revolve around the key purpose of puppetry. Puppet makers incorporate the latest in manufacturing and engineering to construct materials and devices, giving storytelling freedom to the filmmaker and a validity to the puppet.
Even with these advances, puppets of all types remain endearing because they are corporeal phenomenon from human imagination -- no matter how many pneumatic pumps, wires, or googly eyes
One of the oldest puppets on film (or at least the first extant example) comes from Georges Méliès ' 1896 short film Une Nuit Terrible (A Terrible Night) . The piece tells the tale of a man attempting to sleep in his bed and being disturbed by insects. As the man starts to doze, a large insect crawls across his legs. The man panics, striking the insect with a broom before performing a series of professional wrestling moves on it. He eventually beats the insect to death with his shoe and places the crushed carapace into his chamber pot. Upon trying to resume his slumber, a succession of invisible insects bite at his legs. In his newfound insanity, the man tramples his bed.
In this comical short film (or tragic, depending on point of view), Méliès uses a puppet to create an insect never before seen by mankind. This new species of puppet-insect is pulled by an operator off camera by a thin string. The operator then jerks the string in order to bounce the puppet's rubbery legs, making the insect crawl across the screen. This straightforward rig is believable due to the performance of the operator and the actor playing the man. The attempt to create realistic movement pairs with the over the top reactions of the man. On film, the man thinks the insect is real, and the audience follows. Georges Méliès utilizes the ancient art of puppetry to draw both the viewer and the puppet into a new sense of creative existence.
After Méliès, up to the late Twentieth Century, puppets remain a standard in creature special effects on film. However, the technology behind the puppets remains in the same state that they have occupied for centuries. Simple models, hand puppets, ventriloquist dummies (like Charlie McCarthy ), and Méliès-style animals on strings are frequently used as cost-saving effects. The rubber bats bobbing on strings from Universal Picture's 1931 filmare considered laughable, even in its day. Alfred Hitchcock later revisits suspended animals inby pelting Tippi Hedren with fake crows and seagulls.
Progressing from one-string puppets is the traditional marionette, dolls moved by a series of strings or wires. On film, the articulation of the marionette allows filmmakers to tell stories of freely moving people. The problem arising from marionettes is that they are apparent as a puppet and remove from the believability of the special effect. In the early Twentieth Century, audiences feel that marionettes, and puppets themselves, are dolls and toys. They are a childish diversion: playtime.
Marionettes on film and television are extremely direct in targeting children. From 1947 to 1960, NBC airs, a goofy, quasi-educational children's show starring a marionette cowboy. Howdy Doody and his human wranglers go on fun romps in a television studio and on low budget sets ( Woody's Round-up from2 is loosely based on this show). Creator E. Roger Muir and his freckle-faced puppet friend encounter a variety of wacky characters with whimsical names. Howdy Doody interacts with puppets like Captain Windy Scuttlebutt, the chimera Flub-a-Dub, and Paddle the Gnu. Child audiences know that Howdy Doody and friends are puppets, but they also know that they are real puppets. To enamored Baby Boomer audiences, Howdy Doody is a living being driven by marionette gear. He derives his spark and energy from the belief and efforts of his puppeteers and audience.
Early 1960s British marionette science-fiction shows by AP Films take their puppets on grander adventures but are still targeted at children. Series such as,,, andall use the restricted freedom of marionette puppets. They quickly and cheaply, as opposed to animation or human-scale production, make programs about whimsical vehicles and space travel. The technology of marionettes advances with these programs with the invention of "supermarionation." The wires suspending the puppets double as electrical controls for solenoids. Solenoids expand and contract when charged. A solenoid placed in a marionette's mouth receives electrical impulses from a recorded playback, causing the mouth to open and close in time with a voice actor's dialogue.
Child audiences are interested in the imagination shown in Howdy Doody and shows like Thunderbirds . The puppet world shown on their television screens appeals to a belief in something magical drawn from creativity. Consequently, both Howdy Doody and "supermarionation" shows sold toys of their protagonists (also like Toy Story 2 ), allowing children to spend money to play along with their favorite television program. Taking toys on film (or Kinescope) on journeys of the imagination is an activity to which most children can relate.
The 1953 filmillustrates this contemporary sense of puppets. In the film, the titular Lili is a sixteen year old French girl with no place to go. She wanders the country and finds herself at a carnival puppet show. She believes in the magic of puppets and begins to sing with them. The puppeteer Paul has difficulty expressing emotion after being injured in World War II. He communicates with Lili through his puppets. The two form a bond through the puppets and create a show. Her purity of belief and his purity of repressed emotion make the show interesting. Lili talks to the puppets as if they are real people. Several conflicts with magicians and Zsa Zsa Gabor later, Lili is told to grow up and stop believing in the reality of puppets. She runs from the carnival and has a realization that the puppets are different aspects of Paul's personality. Lili returns to the carnival and falls deeply in love with the puppet wrangler and his puppets.
Lili starts as child with a naive belief about puppets. She is told to become an adult because puppets are toys. She does briefly do so but realizes that the puppets are as real as she and Paul make them. They are real because they are extensions of Paul himself, giving life to creatures of his own invention, and Lili's belief as an audience member, bringing them into the real world. This realization and the concept of puppets as childish entertainment center on the cultural picture of puppets in the mid-Twentieth Century.
Because small, creature puppets are considered toys, many filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s turn to large scale puppets to use as visual effects. They hope that building the puppets to a grand scale will mark them as memorable, legendary entities rather than playthings. Filmmakers need puppets to portray the impossible at magnitude.
1954'sfeatures a puppet head on top of a giant lizard costume. The rubber head is malleable to the point where an operator can open and close the mouth of Godzilla . This simple mechanical motion allows Godzilla a broad range of expressions. Godzilla can open its mouth to screech, eat trains, and belch nuclear fire. This type of monster puppet movie grows in popularity in both the United States and Japan, spawning numerous imitations and cross-over monsters with similar puppetry capabilities. The giant scale of Godzilla is taken seriously as a science-fiction film (at least in Japan) with its nuclear weapon allegory. Godzilla later appeals to children with his related monster sparring partners and copy cats. For example,is a children's film because he is a friend of all children. Godzilla is not as friendly as he is the embodiment of the horrors of nuclear warfare -- a concept portrayed in puppet form.
The 1954 Disney adaptation of Jules Vernes'also features a giant puppet. Captain Nemo 's submarine the Nautilus disturbs and is enveloped by a giant squid. Nemo surfaces the ship and orders his crew to remove the offending cephalopod. Nemo confronts the sea creature, and the audience discovers that the squid is a big marionette puppet. The rubber tentacles of the squid dangle from the end of wires suspended from the soundstage rafters. Operators and puppeteers wriggle the appendages in the same way as George Méliès' insect. The mythical poulpe from the novel is brought to life with puppets (and the support of dramatic music and a rain machine). Therefore, the giant squid is the distant marionette cousin of Howdy Doody.
A year later, director Ed Wood attempts the same effect in the film. Dramatically portrayed in the Tim Burton film, Bela Lugosi 's character Dr. Eric Vornoff fights an octopus. As shown in Ed Wood , Ed Wood and crew steal the octopus from a prop warehouse but neglect to steal the associated motor to drive the puppet's tentacles. An intoxicated Bela Lugosi has to thrash about on top of the octopus in order to make the puppet seem like it is killing him. The tragic circumstances surrounding the scene (again, as depicted in Tim Burton's film) lend some drama and reality to the life of the octopus puppet.
On a lighter note, the 1960 Roger Corman filmhas a cheaply made puppet that is effective enough. The puppet plays a talking, man-eating plant named Audrey, Jr. Consisting of cloth and feathers stretched and glued over a frame, Audrey, Jr. barely moves. The plant puppet is never shown as having a joint as it is actually two separate halves. For a low budget comedy, the puppet works as a representation of a meat eating plant. In the remake, Audrey, Jr. transforms into Audrey II , a robotic puppet with weight and articulation. Either way, the Audrey plants are a specific species of talking plant never before witnessed (as a puppet or otherwise).
Moving out of the 1960s, two personalities dominate and revolutionize special effects puppetry on film up to the 1990s: Jim Henson and Stan Winston . Jim Henson focuses on the overtly bright aspects of puppets while Stan Winston focuses on boosting the realism of puppets. Both approaches bring new life to puppets on film and television, based in different ways on audiences believing in the creations.
Jim Henson and his associates Frank Oz , Jane Nebel, and Jerry Juhl distill the purpose of puppets down to its concentrated, imaginative core. A mixture of simplicity, theatricality, expression, and energy mark every Henson puppet created by his Muppet Workshop and later Creature Shop. Starting with appearances on, Henson and friends produce floppy, fuzzy, and witty puppets for coffee commercials,,,,,, and. Each creation is a colorful and endearing creature that frequently requires the combined creativity of two or more people to bring to life.
The puppets spring from Henson and buddies' imaginations but become real. Henson and company rely on the same sense of wonderment and child-like belief found in Howdy Doody . Audiences know that Muppets are special effects but accept them as such. They are Muppets. On the November 19, 2011 episode of Saturday Night Live , Kermit the Frog describes the situation succinctly. In a discussion with show head writer Seth Meyers , the topic of being a puppet arises. Kermit says that Muppets like him are different than puppets, and Meyers asks how. Kermit explains that a puppet is controlled by a person while he is an actual talking frog. If Jim Henson's creative descendents are doing their best with their creations, the audience truly believes Kermit's declaration of self.
Technologically, Jim Henson and his team are highly experimental in their usage of puppets to solve all sorts of special effects quandries. He uses the film Labyrinth as an exploration of puppeteering. In the 1986 film directed by Henson and produced by George Lucas , a great range of puppet effects are used. Aside from Henson's mainstay Muppet-style hand puppet, mechanical contraptions, puppets worn as costumes, and trick photography are used. In the "Fire Gang" sequence, performers wearing chroma key material disappear into the background (more or less) as they exchange the limbs and heads of different puppets. Protagonist character Sarah Williams is drawn into this world and interacts with the physicality of the puppets as she searches for Jareth the Goblin King . Whereas most puppets are physical manifestations of a creative reality visiting this reality, Sarah is a visitor to the world of imagination. Henson's work on creating a believable world of whimsy derives not from a suspension but an embracing of disbelief.
Stan Winston's approach is slightly different from Jim Henson's. Winston's special effects shop primarily produces creatures that are grounded in reality as opposed to whimsy (although one of Winston's first jobs is producing the Wookiee costumes for). Frequently, his works are for horror films, and his puppets are monsters. Of the five times Winston collaborates with James Cameron , four of the times are creating menacing, science-fiction monsters. In this function, his puppets are real because they are meant to scare audiences. An audience member believes that such a creature can exist and generates peril by merely existing.
Stan Winston and his studio create the special effects (ranging from make-up to puppets) for James Cameron'sand. Winston and team work to make the titular Terminator , a cyborg assassin sent from the future. In the 1984 film The Terminator , the Terminator sheds its organic shell to reveal a walking, metal endoskeleton. Through a combination of stop-motio...
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