Getting Moving - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 207

say they I like the differences. Different things made in different ways, that is a great thing to me; and I
won't let my body (me) forget all the beautiful things that it (I) can do. We can't forget movement. We
won't be able to deal with time and space if we do that, so we won't be able to animate or to live.
Discovering stop motion a few months ago was like breathing again. It allows me to use my fi ngers,
hands, arms, legs, eyes, head, nose, in different ways in each different step: making an armature,
building a set, mounting a camera and, of course, animating. For the puppet to begin to move, my whole
body must be moved, and I love that.
So that's what attracts me about stop motion animation.
Pushing the puppet's laws
In another commercial a lump of square cheese had to look sexy as it strutted down a catwalk
in front of rather too excitable cheese crackers. How sexy is a cube wrapped in foil? Not very,
I fear. As I walked it with a certain cocky rhythm I had to twist its shoulders, but it was one of
those moments that when you push a physical object out of its ordinary shape, it stops being
credible. Fine, if this was a drawn lump of cheese or a CG cheese, but somehow physical objects
have an unwritten law about how far you can push, squash and stretch them. Cartoons thrive
on this elasticity, but puppets do not. Even though they may be the most fantastical creations,
they do need to obey some rules and logic of physics and anatomy. Wallace and Gromit are
stretched to a certain degree, and that is dei nitely part of their appeal, but you couldn't stretch
them in the way that Tom and Jerry were stretched like a twanging rubber band. My sexy
cheese might have been that sexier if it had stayed a rigid cube and I had relied totally on subtle
changes of rhythm; as it was, the cheese suddenly looked rather elastic and very unappealing.
The physicality that one gives to a puppet can be both a handicap and a release. In my i lm
Next , it seemed totally in the context of the piece that Shakespeare might pull his own head
of and use that as Yorick's skull, as he was already doing some pretty bizarre acrobatics. I had
made my Shakespeare puppet so credible (some people today still do a double take - oh yes,
I have had letters addressed to the actor who played Shakespeare …!) that I could push his
physicality only so far. When the time came to stage the Hamlet scene, I couldn't do it. I had
given that puppet a life and shown him obeying gravity, albeit a rather l uid gravity, and other
natural laws. All of a sudden the gag seemed totally out of place in the i lm and, being honest,
I'm not sure I would have liked to have seen that puppet without his head. By that stage of the
i lming, Shakespeare was more to me than a puppet. This pushing of the credibility of a puppet
is an odd thing. We strive to make inanimate things do things that seem possible, while live
actors and circus performers often strive to do the impossible. In Aurelia's Oratorio , Chaplin's
great-granddaughter delighted in extraordinary illusions just feet away from me.
One of these involved apparently separating her head from her body and letting
the head l oat up attached to a string as if it were a balloon. It was a staggering
illusion as she could have hardly done that for real. The audience knows the
physical limitations of the performer, and yet here she was apparently crossing
those limitations. If I had done the same illusion with my Shakespeare puppet,
no-one would have blinked an eye. Animation is the reverse. The audience know