Puppets - Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance - page 36

Seeing the strings on these marionettes was part of the trick,
and never worried me. The brilliant stage show, Thunderbirds are
Fab , a loving homage to the Gerry Anderson oeuvre, reversed
the trick of seeing puppets act like humans and imagined
stringless actors behaving like marionettes, with beautifully
observed detail. The audience knows how a human walks,
but these actors appeared weightless, responding with that
recognisable slight lack of coordination. The moment the actor,
with his spectacular Thunderbirds 2 model worn as a hat (like
my Shakespeare puppet and his Tempest hat), moved through a
succession of tiny palm trees worn on his i ngers will stay with
me for a long time.

I didn't have a history of seeing marionettes. I had a Pelham
Puppet (a badly sculpted witch), but my mastery of the
technique never got beyond jiggling about most inelegantly.
This being not very beautiful, nor controlled nor weighty
movement tempered my af ection for marionettes. Any
performance was haphazard to say the least, and stop motion
animators certainly like precision. The arms waved around a lot,
while the legs l opped nastily beneath, making a puppet walk
almost impossible, lacking the essential convincing contact with
the ground.

One of the world-saving
Tracy family puppets
from Gerry Anderson's
Thunderbirds (Richard
Haynes).

The Sound of Music

That, and so much more, changed with The Sound of Music . The puppets in the Lonely Goatherd
sequence have had a profound inl uence on me. Even today, it is a beautifully executed and
dazzlingly performed sequence. The actual performance by the puppets is rather economic,
with most of the energy created through the editing. Aged ten, to me the naughty nuns
seemed fun, Julie Andrews was luminous, the scenery breathtaking, and Eleanor Parker and
Christopher Plummer … well the i lm is too full of so many gloriously guilty pleasures, but I just
need to hear that opening music to Lonely Goatherd and I have watch the whole sequence
with complete and utter attention and respect. I suspected that Julie Andrews and the kids
were probably fronting for the real hidden puppeteers and that the sequence was not i lmed in
real time. The manipulators gave the characters much life, especially with the eyes, but it wasn't
just the gorgeous design, the exhilarating song or the choreography that had me entranced.

I knew that something else was going on, although I couldn't quite articulate what. I knew
that this puppet show wasn't there as a charming diversion to keep the kids, on screen and of ,
happy. I was aware that the puppets were echoing the main triangular relationship
of the i lm, and this struck me as most agreeable. I noticed how the relationship
between the lovers and the mother was rel ected in the goat puppets, through
use of colour (especially that ravishing purple), and with eye movements of the
'mother' character. This was the moment that semiology planted a seed in my
head. I began to realise that other elements could tell the story, not just the
more obvious and literal plot. It was these echoes and parallels that fascinated