Puppets - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 32

The tangible relationship between Pinocchio and Geppetto (Saemi Takahashi).
Although having rather dismissed ventriloquism, those brilliantly made ventriloquist i lms,
Dead of Night and Magic , still strike a chord of excitement with me, especially for the moment
when the puppet, physically disconnected from its operator, appears to have life of its own.
Every so often ventriloquists leave their puppet on a chair, and it carries on chatting (though
little else). Suddenly I am interested, as I hope the puppet might walk with the ultimate illusion,
but I'm usually disappointed. All animators can respond to giving life to a puppet, knowing it's
a trick and an indulgent piece of psychology, but when the puppet starts to respond by itself,
it is both exciting and unnerving. This element is an essential part of stop motion. The puppet
often provides much of the performance, separate from us.
When the creation starts to have its own life then we are dei nitely into Frankenstein's monster
territory. He, like Maria in Metropolis , the Golem (and how ripe this story is for animation,
especially with its clay creation), the Nutcracker, Petruschka and a million other icons, are
essentially large puppets given life by a puppeteer. Often the story centres on the troubled
relationship between the puppet and the puppeteer, the creator and the created,
or whatever roles we like to give them. Most of these stories come with inherent
warnings about the responsibilities of creation, especially when the two characters
are separated or fall out. Do these constant battles embody an eternal battle in us
between the more attractive free spirit and the rather regretful staid conventional
persona? Puppets seem to represent a huge range of emotion, from wide-eyed
innocence through tragic incompleteness to downright sinister. Often puppets