Editor Ruby and Private Event Specialist Greg are here to talk about puppets!

We ran a round earlier in the week for World Puppetry Day, which was on Monday. While working on it, I found a lot of cool facts about puppets I couldn’t reasonably expect players to know. Puppetry is, unsurprisingly, very old, with evidence dating back to the fifth century BCE in Greece and the second century BCE in the Indus valley. While arm-operated puppets like on “Sesame Street” and marionettes like Pinocchio tend to dominate U.S. culture, I wanted to dig into two other kinds: giant puppets and shadow puppets.

I personally feel connected to giant, or carnival, puppets, because I grew up near one of the country’s preeminent giant puppet theaters, and now live right near another. Bread and Puppet Theater is one of the oldest, largest, and most established nonprofit puppet theaters in the country, located in Glover, Vermont, in a real part of the state called the Northeast Kingdom. There’s no event in my hometown of Montpelier missing giant puppets, whether it’s the Fire and Ice festival, the First Night (aka New Year’s Eve) parade, or the third of July parade (held on the third to allow people from surrounding towns to go to their local festivals on the fourth — all the “big cities” in Vermont have their celebrations on the third). I felt very at home when I got to Minneapolis and was able to switch right over to In the Heart of the Beast Theater, which, among other programs, organized the May Day parade until the last few years. Minneapolis is also graced with BareBones Puppet Theater, who organize a Halloween show every year. In my opinion, it’s not a parade, a protest, or a real party until someone shows up with a puppet taller than them. Now Greg is going to tell you about more kinds of puppets!

Private Event Specialist Greg here, tagging in to talk a bit about the two-dimensional world of shadow puppetry! Shadow puppetry is ancient, perhaps its earliest incarnations (alongside animation) being cave paintings. In his documentary “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” Werner Herzog, working from an article by Judith Thurman, proposes that early cave drawings laid over each other in different colors were intended to come to life in the flickering inconsistency of torchlight.

And fittingly, animation and shadow puppetry continue to go hand in hand. The earliest surviving animated feature is “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” directed and animated by Lotte Reiniger. We could write a whole Know-It-All on her pioneering work, stacking up over 70 films to her name. She hand-cut the shadow puppets used in her work and filmed them to live scoring of musicians on flute and glockenspiel, using her hands to bring the characters to life on rolling film and frame-by-frame animation alike. Since it’s a silent film, it lends itself to composers providing new scores for live performances around the world. I was lucky enough to catch one of those at Omaha's independent theater chain some years ago.

In the middle of cave paintings and animated film timeline, you’ll find the thousands-years-long tradition of puppetry throughout the Indonesian archipelago, particularly on the island of Java. There you’ll find Wayang puppet theaters, where talented practitioners puppeteer a mix of three-dimensional figural marionettes and flat characters throughout stories that tell the islands’ myriad cultural histories. The puppets are tremendously detailed works of craftsmanship, and each show may utilize hundreds of them.

One notable continuation of the art form is Nia DaCosta’s 2021 film, “Candyman.” A content warning is called for here, as the film deals with themes of racialized brutality toward Black Americans. DaCosta collaborated with Manual Cinema of Chicago to use the medium of incredibly emotive shadow puppets in the film. They allowed the hands to be seen at times to acknowledge the manipulations inherent in the themes. The film’s closing credits in particular is the only credits sequence I can think of that has actively made me cry.

Lastly, let’s look to the future of the medium! "Hidari" is a stop-motion animated short about a real Japanese sculptor named Hidari Jingoro, re-imagining his (possibly fictional anyway) life as a wandering avatar of justice. The short is the three-year-long work of an incredible team of animators and craftsmen, and they’re now seeking funding and additional partners to create a feature-length release. “You think a depressed person could make this?” this is not. (Not that we want to diminish the incredible work of depressed people. Heck, we’re some of them!)