Puppetry: Coming Soon To A Theatre Near You?
Where the Wild Things Are is just one of several examples of recent hand-crafted films featuring puppets
A few weeks ago The Toronto Star ran an interesting article explaining how puppets got to be so cool. The article talks about Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, which is just one example of what I think is a much bigger trend towards a growing appetite for interesting, intelligent, handcrafted films. The current renaissance in stop motion animation (which isn’t puppetry per se, but is pretty darn close) and the return to popularity of 2D animated films like The Princess and the Frog and Ponyo offer further evidence of this.
Hollywood is starting to pay attention. The Muppets’ latest viral video, Bohemian Rhapsody (see previous post), has been watched close to 5 million times since it debuted on Monday, part of Disney’s build up to a new Muppet film called The Cheapest Muppet Movie Ever that’s going in to production. Likewise, the Jim Henson Company is slowly moving forward with a film based on Fraggle Rock and they’ve gone out of their way to stress to fans that it’ll be made the old fashioned way, with puppets instead of new fangled CGI wizardry. Making films based on established Muppet franchises is a safe bet for Hollywood at this point, but it will be very interesting to see what happens if either of those movies are a big hit when they’re released over the next few years.
I’ve always believed that audiences just want to be entertained and care more about a good story than what medium it’s told in, but movies like Where The Wild Things Are and Fantastic Mr. Fox are helping to dispel the myth that all anyone wants to see is computer generated animation. Although I don’t think we’ll see a deluge of puppet films at the box office just yet, don’t be surprised if sometime in the next five years one or two puppet movies hit big and everyone is talking about how puppetry has finally arrived as the next big thing.
Two pupet films well worth seeing more than once were/are CORALINE and FANTASTIC MR. FOX. BOTH were among the best films of recent memory, both were expertly put tgether “by hand”.
I finally saw WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. It had been on my to do list. But frankly, I felt some disappointment. The biggest problem for me was the jerky camera movement which induced a bit of sea-sickness or nausea. It was as dramatic a contrast to camera work in A SINGLE MAN as I could imagine.
The WILD BEINGS had the desired quality of being close to the original book ikllustrations–which was a plus. I had greater satisfaction from seeing BEING JOHN MALKOVITCH– which pulled off making a fantastic entry into Malkovich’s brain believable. And BEING JOHN MALKOVICH was not saddled with jerky camera work.
Amplifying a short book with minimal wordage into a feature film can be a challenge. But to have the boy actually set out in a real boat in search of a wild land, instead of fnding it within the walls of his bedroom, for me, misses a point of the book.
As a kid, I travelled to space in my dreams, saw moving patterns in wallpaper.