Puppets - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 27

easy, is pretty odd, but hang on, an animator's
career is pretty strange.

Ventriloquism on the radio has worked, on
occasion, owing to the strength of the puppet's
character, but that is one bizarre idea. I am
mainly cold towards ventriloquist puppets,
apart from the reliance on the voice, because of
the lack of movement, and it is this movement
that drives me. I'm not always interested in
facial expressions, but more interested in body
language, and a doll with a man's hand up his
back, and limply swinging, scarily dead legs and
loose l oppy arms doesn't work for me. The big
detailed head, the invariable glass eyes, and
the noisy open or shut mouth never appealed.
The nature of a forced voice thrown with a tight
closed mouth, resulting in usually unattractive
voices, didn't help either.

Kermit, from the Muppets, works much better
for me as he does have those amazingly
expressive arms and a face which, while
deliberately lacking the detail of a carved
ventriloquist's puppet's face, does have the
human spontaneity and subtlety element of which only a real hand-in-a-glove puppet is capable.
Simplicity is probably Kermit's greatest visual strength as our imagination comes into play. The
operators i nd the most basic essence of the expression and we supply the rest.

A ventriloquist and his puppet (Saemi
Takahashi).

There is a hugely popular, but unsettling, comedian in the north of England, Frank
Sidebottom, who is never seen with his real face exposed. He wears a large, obvious papier
mâché ball-shaped head, with a i xed painted manic expression, and from the safety of this
head he can say things he would never get away with otherwise. His identity is a closely
guarded secret. To some extent he has become the ventriloquist's puppet without the
intruding arm. I like they way that while his face is totally motionless, his body and voice do all
the performing.

Although I am uncomfortable with them, the imagery of ventriloquists has popped up in my
work (and that of many other animators). Mr Toad, from The Wind in the Willows , often play
acted, and in one episode he used his hands as a mouth inside a white sheet, scaring Mole with
a ghost story. My Shakespeare puppet used his hands to suggest the mouth of the chattering
dummy puppet while acting out the Beatrice and Benedict moment in Next , but
in Rigoletto I nearly went much further, by initially giving Rigoletto a folly stick
that he could use to voice the insults he hurled at the court; the distance lending
acceptability. This seemed to be the idea of animation itself: using a puppet to say
things that could not be said by anyone else. I love the brief scenes Mary Poppins
has with her talking umbrella, in essence a folly stick itself, which speaks its mind
regardless. The parrot talks about the family's ingratitude, and Mary gently closes