Cataloguing Animation Puppets
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Hosseini-Shakib, Fatemeh. "The Puppet as Not-Puppet: The Notion of Puppet as ‘Human in Theatrical Performance’ in the Works of Barry Purves (the Case of Screen Play)." Global Animation Theory: International Perspectives at Animafest Zagreb. Ed. Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gili#, Holger Lang, Daniel Šulji# and Hrvoje Turkovi#. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 197–212. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501337161.ch-012>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 18:59 UTC. Copyright © Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gili#, Holger Lang, Daniel Šulji#, Hrvoje Turkovi#, and Contributors and Cover image Zlatka Salopek 2019. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 12 The Puppet as Not-Puppet The Notion of Puppet as ‘Human in Theatrical Performance’ in the Works of Barry Purves (the Case of Screen Play ) Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib A puppet is a puppet is a puppet. Wrong! Puppets subjugated to the purposes of animation are distinctly different from all other fi gurative forms and fi gurations that are generally subsumed under this term. Animation puppets are not hand puppets or marionettes – although they are to be looked at, they are not decorative . Their life expectancy is usually quite brief because they are commodities . It is not the puppet that counts, but its cinematic image. BASGIER 2003 : 97 The puppet animations of Barry Purves show his continued passion and fascination with theatre, opera and other forms of live performance. Purves’s puppets in fi lms such as Next (1989), Screen Play (1992), Rigolletto (1993), 197 198 GLOBAL ANIMATION THEORY Achilles (1995), Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models (1998) and Tchaikovsky (2011) take the place of human actors in acting out different methods of live performances. Most prominently, puppets are used in place of actors in theatre and opera performances, and go beyond any straightforward notion of puppet fi lms as represented and experienced by Purves’ predecessors. This approach to puppets is also dissimilar to the great amount of puppet animation series Purves has made for children as an animator or director, and to the animal characters in his fi lm Hamilton Mattress (2001). Purves as a master puppet animator has worked for animation companies since 1978. However, in his independent fi lms, he emerges as an auteur of a canon of fi lms with certain themes and iconographic elements that give a central weight and signifi cance to his puppets to the point of ‘blurring the line between actors and puppets’ ( Purves 2008 : 20). This chapter explores the very diverse and innovative notion of puppets in Purves’s fi lms, epitomized in his Screen Play , as the main case study in relation to the idea of ‘puppet realism’. The terms ‘realism’ and ‘puppet realism’ should be used with caution as in this chapter I do not take them to mean the precise copying of life, or a fi lmic record of it, which is often understood as ‘realistic- ness’ or ‘lifelikeness’. Purves himself is not at all inclined to understand realism in the sense of simulating physical reality point by point. Reminiscing about his childhood memories of Snow White in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), he compares the exaggerated stretched and squashed movement of the dwarves with those of Snow White’s ‘realistic timing and movements’, and concludes that the illusion created by the dwarves’ exaggerated actions were much more truthful and credible than Snow White’s rotoscoped performance based on ‘real’ action. Her movements to his judgement had ‘an unsettling effect’ that he would rather not watch (ibid.). As for Purves, the animator must be a performer per se , and thus his puppets, whatever role they play, must be credible: There are moments in my fi lms when the animation becomes invisible. I’m pleased that the audience doesn’t always notice my black fi gures in Screen Play , nor do they assume that the lifeless characters in Next or Achilles are actually animated. These characters seem to fall with appropriate weight and react naturally to being picked up . I like the irony of putting as much effort into making something look lifeless as it does to make it look full of life. PURVES 2008: 251 Yet, Purves’s puppets hardly fi t into traditional defi nitions. A closer examination of Purves’s independent works shows that, for Purves, the concept of puppet is neither heir to how it is understood in puppet theatre or ‘a cartoonish character’ that has made its way into the three-dimensional THE PUPPET AS NOT-PUPPET 199 realm; these are rather ‘humans in a theatrical performance’. From the very realistically rendered and animated puppets in Next , Screen Play , Achilles and Tchaikovsky to more stylized ones in Rigolletto and Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models , all of Purves’s puppets represent human ‘actors/ actresses’ rather than cartoon characters or anthropomorphized animals, and they ‘perform’ as if on a live ‘theatrical’ stage, ‘fi lmed’ by a camera of sorts. It is as if all that is possible in the stop- motion technique serves Purves to simulate and create his own version of theatre, albeit in animation. This is Purves’s imagined, rather extravagant theatre, made possible by stop- motion technique and his elaborate skill of animating and performing with detail and precision. By concentrating on the works mentioned, and Screen Play as the key exemplar of such an unconventional and rather unusual approach to puppet realism in animation, this chapter theorizes on the question of realism in 3D puppet animation. The approach to realism in these fi lms, it is argued, makes the question of realism peculiar to a disparate notion of realism rather than what is generally understood as realism – or ‘hyper realism’ as termed by Wells ( 1998 ) – in commercial and mainstream works of companies such as Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Aardman and Laika. 1 The scarcity of studies on non-CG 3D animation and puppet animation as an immensely varied form with a historical cannon of endless styles, techniques and approaches, makes any discussion of 3D animation hard to launch. The puppet fi lms of Barry Purves, especially his Screen Play made in 1992, provide a rich site to study a type of realism that may contribute to the debates surrounding realism in puppet animation. Furthermore, the centrality of the notion of the puppet as a non-puppet or as ‘human beings in performance’ in Purves’s work creates a space to discuss a typology of puppets in puppet animation in general. The problem of realism Historically, it seems that the question of realism in animation was raised, and mostly rejected, even in the early days of cinema theory, by the few cinema theorists who bothered to discuss animation at all. The 2D ‘animated cartoon’ was the dominant form of animation emerging from the United States in the early decades of animation history, therefore animation was considered to be synonymous with this technique. Based on the now infamous thesis of ‘medium specifi city’, early theories considered animation (2D cartoons) as belonging to the realm of fantasy and imagination, as opposed 1 In fact, this is part of a much bigger query researched in my PhD thesis on realism in stop- motion animation (Hosseini-Shakib 2009). 200 GLOBAL ANIMATION THEORY to live- action cinema, which was vastly believed to be the ‘right’ and ‘appropriate’ fi eld for physical reality and its image. Hence, debates over realism, if any, rotate solely around the legitimacy or otherwise of animation to represent physical reality the way live- action cinema does. In this, the whole argument is reduced and reshaped as prescribing certain missions for animation, in contrast to the missions prescribed to live- action cinema. Yet, realism as an essential style of imaging, drawing or painting has not been as much of a problem for animation as it has when compared with the use of live- action cinema’s narrative tools and cinematic language. Thus, the problem with realism in animation may be epitomized in Disney features, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937). 2 Other fi lms in one way or another follow their recipe in adopting the codes and conventions of mainstream cinematic narrative. Siegfried Kracauer, an important theorist of realism in cinema, expresses his belief in the unsuitability of animation to represent what he called ‘camera reality’, and offers a fundamental defi nition of animation as ‘life reproduced in drawings’ (Kracauer 1960: 90). He criticizes the realist tendencies that ultimately dominated Disney’s aesthetics: ‘There is a growing tendency towards camera- reality in his [Disney’s] later full- length fi lms. Peopled with the counterparts of real landscape and real human beings, they are not so much “drawings brought to life as life reproduced in drawings”’ ( Ibid ). In Understanding Animation (1998) Paul Wells asserts that in contrast to all Disney’s attempts at realism, animation is a medium that inherently ‘resists’ realism, and instead creates several styles that are ‘about realism’. Wells, himself deeply dissatisfi ed with the prevalence of Disney’s style causing other forms to be overshadowed, still suggests Disney realism to be the ‘yardstick’ to measure other types of realism in animation (Wells 1998 : 25). What Wells means by hyper- realism is the particular manner by which a somehow exaggerated account of physical reality is mixed with cartoon conventions and cinematic language to shape a form that does not exactly resemble reality, although it is not far from it, and at times goes beyond the possibilities of physical reality using the cartoon’s unique vocabulary of exaggeration and fantasy.