What Is a Puppet?

Nate Biagiotti commissioned a piece on Puppets in Film. This interview is the product of that exploration. Many thanks to Nate for supporting Post-Credit Coda through our Patreon.

Taylor Cawley as Athena + The Collective in The Medusa Play. Directed by Ryan Rebel and Ang Bey. Puppet design by Jo Vito Ramírez. Find their work at jovitoramirez.net

RYAN REBEL: I'm here with my friend Jo Vito Ramírez to talk about puppets in film. Tell me about what makes you a puppet person and why you're so qualified to be here.

JO VITO RAMÍREZ: Hey, take it easy. The easiest answer is that I make and use puppets and I have for years.

RYAN: Jo is a phenomenal puppet builder, they've made puppets for my plays and many others. They're constantly adapting and learning new things, trying to make the form and content functional together. So we can think about form and content with these clips, and whether we like the puppets or not, if they work, what is puppet and what isn't.

JO: Ooh that's great, we should look up the definition.

RYAN: "A movable model of a person or animal that is used in entertainment and is typically moved either by strings controlled from above or by a hand inside it."

JO: Wow. That is too narrow! That's terrible. That's not true at all. Only an animal or person? Strings above or hand inside it? So a simple rod puppet wouldn't even exist. Like that little wormy boy in Sesame Street. That would be rod from beneath, so it wouldn't fit this definition.

RYAN: Some of these clips might blur the lines, so I'm curious what you'll think. Let's watch the first one.

DUMMY (2002)  Review Link

RYAN: So was that puppetry?

JO: Yes.

RYAN: First impression?

JO: My first impression is that Adrien Brody did a good job of creeping me out, which is nice. The puppet itself... until Jeff Dunham did his thing, my experience of ventriloquist dummies was that they were supposed to be creepy. Like the Goosebumps dummy.

RYAN: Smacky. Slappy. Happy. Whatever his name is.

JO: This is in line with that, totally creepy. Not because of the doll itself, but because of the person who's using it. The dummy is essentially just there to chastise or correct him. Like the Big Other. It's functioning as his shame.

RYAN: The premise is that he's a socially awkward man who finds courage to do things like talk to girls and violate restraining orders with the help of this dummy.

JO: It's functional. The form and content are in line here. You're very aware that it's a puppet, and that's a little disconcerting.

RYAN: The classic design of the puppet plays into that. This movie's not great, but I do think Adrien Brody is a great actor who is very soft with the puppet, listening.

JO: Adrien Brody's character in this movie is not a wonderful ventriloquist, but certainly a functional one. The voice of the puppet and his voice are very similar.

RYAN: It doesn't really work for cutaways, when we are watching the woman's face while he's switching back and forth. It falls apart in those moments. It's an interesting one to start with because it's a diegetic example of puppets. In the movie there is a puppet that an actor is controlling rather than a technician.

JO: In this first scene when he's laying down it looks like he could easily not be controlling the puppet. There could be a benefit to someone else doing it because you can have the puppet be more expressive. You don't have to be two people at once.

RYAN: On the other hand, there is a potential benefit from having the actor basically live with this puppet the whole time and have a holistic performance in that way. Which, I get the feeling is what happened here?

JO: I would say so. There's nothing magical about this. Often puppets are used to make things magical. Like Cousin Skeeter. Or the Kimmy Schmidt episode where Mikey's grandma is just so ancient that she's a puppet. But this isn't that at all; it's laid bare, the relationship is there for everyone to see, and the relationship itself is a psychological bandage for this guy.

RYAN: Questionable movie, but as far as the puppet: nice job.

JO: Yeah!

NAKED LUNCH (1991)

RYAN: Was that puppetry?

JO: Yes.

RYAN: Clearly. You're familiar with Naked Lunch the book?

JO: Yes, though I haven't read it.

RYAN: I watched this as the last movie in a Cronenberg triple feature, and by that point in the movie I was totally zonked and had no idea what was happening. My cloudy experience speaks to the experience of the protagonist-- we have Robocop (Peter Weller) here as our perspective character, being placidly baffled.

JO: William Burroughs was a notorious heroine addict. He tended to be zonked. He was older than the other Beats and very wealthy. He would sit back, drop a few bits of wisdom, and zonk out in his chair. Given all that, I like the use of the puppet here because it really brings you into this magic realism place. When you're constantly on drugs, I imagine the world starts to unfurl and things become wonky. This is creepy. We have here a creepy puppet. It's got a hand for the 'mouth,' like a sock puppet, and the wings and pincers are operated separately. There's a different puppet at the end; he squishes it. It's clear there's no goop in the first puppet, but when he squishes it it explodes in a gooey mess. That's a question I had for you-- if a thing is created just to be destroyed, is it a puppet?

RYAN: Well, there's a distinction in this case. It was destroyed, but it still moved afterwards. Some chunky bits of it were being motilized.

JO: Oh yeah that's right! Definitely a puppet then.

RYAN: I'm not sure about other cases.

JO: If the entire point of the thing is to explode... I'm tempted to call it a puppet also, because you're acting on a thing with force. I don't want to distinguish that from using your hand to open and close its mouth.

RYAN: Whether the force keeps it together or disperses it.

JO: It was cool, it was creepy, I liked it. The little anus in the back.

RYAN: The puppet is an incredible design, visceral but simple in its moving parts.

JO: The movement of the mouth anus is... eerie. It's eerie to watch. If this was a little critter who talked from its mouth, it wouldn't be nearly as creepy.

RYAN: I also love the character moment where it asks him to put powder on its mouth and he puts it on the anus, not the pincers.

JO: He actually kind of got into it. This again gives you a sense of how zonked and drugged up this guy is, because any sensation can take hold of him.

RYAN: I think it's important that the case worker is a decrepit creature, the pincers and arms can only jerk back and forth. It's helpless but in a position of power.

JO: I would say this is a pretty cool puppet.

RYAN: One thing I liked was the way the materials all progress through the action.

JO: Sure. It's clear that this mouth is operated by a hand underneath that's opening and closing, so you expect it to be made out of some kind of foam. To see the gloop feels like a violation of my expectations, which I like. It's supposed to be a creepy moment, and it's somehow creepier that way. Even I, who is trying to pay attention to this puppet, was surprised by that.

RYAN: You know subliminally that it is a puppet, so you do not expect the guts.

THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS (2018)

click to watch clip because embedding youtube videos in blogger is a nightmare!!!

RYAN: Was that puppetry?

JO: Yeah. That was a lot of it. Wow-woo.

RYAN: What did you think of it?

JO: These kinds of puppets, the felt ones with the hand mouths, and the arms either operated with rods or other hands, are Muppets, right? They're a genre popularized by Jim Henson. I think they're great, I like when we see whole worlds made of Muppets.

RYAN: In fact, this movie was directed by his son Brian Henson.

JO: That makes sense. I like these very much. They're actually really minimal! Sometimes you have them with moving parts, eyebrows or blinking eyes, but in general they're glorified sock puppets. The economy of that is appealing to me, and they can be very expressive without their expressions changing. The only human we for sure see in this was the one on the table getting whipped by the dalmatian, and I like that very much because he's the most submissive character.

RYAN: I think in the full movie the detective partners up with a human to solve a crime.

JO: We see them doing a lot. They're doing all kinds of things. Driving a car, walking around the store, interacting with objects. A cow being milked in real time by an octopus. That's obviously another mechanism that has to be created. The milk spurting. What else? We saw the rabbit pee itself, then lay... eggs. Perhaps that was its water breaking, I'm not sure.

RYAN: I think it...

JO: Gooped itself.

RYAN: Glitter gooped itself.

JO: So they're doing a lot of things. The one at the beginning had rabbit legs. Most of the time when you see these puppets, you don't see their legs because there's a puppeteer under there. I don't know how they function when you see their legs, I haven't tried that yet.

RYAN: Hearing you talk about their simplicity, I'm impressed by the expressive gestural attention to detail. There was a clear escalation in the milking scene as it went on. There's also little things like the way that the main character processes information as he's walking down the hallway. He does a subtle double take. Stuff like that makes them feel real rather than fixtures.

JO: Their hands being human hands in gloves is useful. It makes me think of the Swedish Chef. You're really meant to focus on the hands.

RYAN: So the premise of this movie is: Muppets but inappropriate. That's really it. Honestly it seems like a horrible distasteful movie to sit through. But that doesn't mean the puppets aren't impressive in it. One thing I found conceptually distracting watching this clip: there's just too much going on. They're doing animal puns for the porns, but they're also doing puppet puns. They stick 'puppet' in front of everything to make a gag of it. This is clearly a world in which they're conscious of themselves as puppets, yet they're not being puppeted. What does puppet mean to them? Their heads explode and it's just cotton in there, like stuffed animals.

JO: It's like 'human,' which is weird because we don't call it Human Porn.

RYAN: 'We are humans, but made of felt and cotton,' I guess.

JO: I liked the explosions. I would guess that they're not exploding from the outside like a gunshot, but there's a little explosive on the inside that makes their head blow off. That has to be operated as well. I think watching a whole movie of this would be really tiresome... but I just like puppets so much.

KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE (1988)

RYAN: Was that puppetry?

JO: Uh... yes.

RYAN: We're getting into some trickier terrain. Let's first talk about the human puppet.

JO: That was not puppetry. Just a human pretending to be a puppet badly.

RYAN: But it is a puppet within the universe of the movie, which is interesting. A human actor whose job is to embody a human being puppeted by an inhuman creature.

JO: If the inhuman creature that was puppeting him had any sort of effect whatsoever on the way he was acting, I might be tempted to call it an actual puppet. At one point he leans in, and one could make the case that if the person holding onto him is pushing him forward, maybe he is acting as a puppet in some way. Many directors would probably not like that very much.

RYAN: You get into a slippery slope. Anytime an actor gives a lift to another actor, is it a puppet move? No. But in the Whose Line? game Dead Body, where the performers are dragging around the limp body of one of the other performers, that's probably puppetry, right?

JO: Maybe. It's a better case than this one.

RYAN: The Klown in this clip is pretty clearly a human in a costume, but has a head that is a puppet mechanism.

JO: Its eyes blink mechanically and its mouth also seems to function mechanically somehow. This kind of puppet reminds me of the TV show Dinosaurs, which used this puppet for all the characters. I don't know how they function, truly. I don't know who operates all the actions of the head. I would imagine the actor on the inside would at least be responsible for the functions of the mouth, but it's possible that it's remote controlled.

RYAN: The Ninja Turtles movies were like this too.

JO: There were two different puppets at least, the costume puppet with the person in there, and the one where its nose gets shot off and it spun around and you didn't see anything but the head. I would guess that's a different puppet because it's the one that gets destroyed, and obviously you can't explode it with a human inside.

RYAN: If the head was lower budget and didn't articulate at all, and it was a human in a costume with a big funky head, it would not be a puppet?

JO: Masks are very much like puppetry to me. I don't think it's about the complexity.

RYAN: The premise of this movie is: these are Killer Klowns from Outer Space. These are aliens. I love the puppetry, I think it's creepy and goofy at the same time, which partially has to do with how limited the expressions are. There's something eerie about the stoic expressions that articulate in spooky ways.

JO: I think what makes that scary is the juxtaposition between the natural body, which moves in a way that we're familiar with, and the creepy puppet features joined onto that. I'm noticing themes while watching these. One is, easily recognizable human features vs. stylized puppet features, and how that affects how the puppet is received. The second thing is: explosions! Everybody loves to destroy puppets apparently.

A TRIP TO THE MOON (1902)

RYAN: This is a 1902 film, an extremely early special effects showcase. Was this puppetry, and if so which aspects of it?

JO: There's incontrovertible evidence of puppetry here, but I have some questions too. Is the man in the moon a puppet? We see a human face, essentially in a mask of the moon. Is that a puppet? Let me think, what do you think Ryan?

RYAN: Unless you consider a mask a puppet, which we might, it's not a puppet. But there's the rocket. I can't tell if we would call that a puppet either, because it seems like it is instantly there. It's not being operated to smash into the face; they use editing to make it seem like it collided. In which case it would just be a prop, I guess.

JO: I would say so. I don't know about the moon. The face is clearly set in a frame, and if you can stick another face in that frame, it will always be the moon... The question is, what's the difference between putting a face in there, and having a mouth slit that you operate with your hand. You would call it a puppet if it has a mouth slit, but if you put an actual mouth in there, does that disqualify it?

RYAN: Because you're only operating your own face? I think what we're discovering is that we are all flesh puppets.

JO: I think that's true. We think of the word 'operate' in terms of our hands, but we can operate something with our facial muscles as well.

RYAN: Or with technology. Our hands at removal.

JO: I'm gonna call it a puppet, because we didn't see the rest of the body either. There was something inherently not human about the thing. It felt self-contained, and it had a landscape around it that justified it. In terms of the rocket moving around, it's a prop not a puppet because we just see the actors pushing it. Except at the very end when it arrives into the landscape and we see it seemingly move of its own accord.

RYAN: I was wondering about that. If you attach strings to an object it's a puppet because there's some removal there?

JO: I don't believe that I have the proper definition, but I think it'll be fun to try to develop one based on the materials you've presented to me. So... if a setpiece or prop is operated in a way that is... oh gosh. This is sticky territory. I don't think rolling on a set or backdrop is a puppet, for instance.

RYAN: If an object is articulated as if it has some motion of its own accord?

JO: Yeah, it has to appear to have agency. It is alive in some way. Alive is a tricky word because you can make a puppet out of inanimate objects, but there has to be some animus. It needs to be animated.

RYAN: This is another argument for the moon to be a puppet here. It's not just an object to be interacted with, the moon has life of its own. It is animated.

JO: I'm probably going to end up on the side of masks can be puppets. From my experience, you give yourself to the mask. Your focus becomes the focus of the mask, the mask becomes the character, and your job is to animate that character. Not for the mask to change you, but for you to animate the mask. That might be the difference.

RYAN: So puppetry is a More Than, it's an object that has More Than an object, or a person who is More Than a person because of the mask that they put on. It's in the excess. I don't mean in design, so much as spirit.

JO: Spirit is the right word, because spirit derives from the Latin word for breath. The word I was landing on was animation or animus. Life, breath. Giving life to something otherwise lifeless... I don't know where to go from here.

RYAN: So when you attach strings to the rocket and make it fly, you're giving life to that machine. Presenting the spirit of a rocket in flight.

JO: So, then is an actual rocket a puppet? Whether you put it on strings or propel it with chemicals...

RYAN: Maybe. It's different if it's in art.

JO: What if you're using an actual rocket in art? These boundaries are so slippery. The thesis is that puppetry itself is very permeable. Puppets have the ability to traverse the material plane, and that's part of why it is compelling.

RYAN: Puppets are articulated objects, people, or animals, with some animus of spirit, that can traverse the material plane. That's a wishy-washy one, but no definition will be satisfying.

JO: 'For the sake of storytelling.' I feel like that's always true.

RYAN: Well, we're going to need all the knowledge we've gathered for this final clip.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION (1997)  Review Link

RYAN: Puppetry?

JO: Heartbreaking puppetry.

RYAN: Yeah kind of!

JO: I've only seen this clip, and it's so sad. I don't know what this thing has done wrong and it's getting betrayed.

RYAN: Oh it murdered a ton of people. Ripley is its mom in this one. It's confusing. So... when we think about our sad alien friend here, the sound design is great, and the eyes are what make it sad. You see them from deep inside. I don't know how they did that.

JO: They're weirdly sentimental. There's a lot of feeling in those eyes, which is certainly a testament to the skill of the maker. If it's always close up when we look at the eyes, I would make a mask and have a human wear it with contacts. But this could be a prosthetic, a mask that a human is wearing that could give that sentimental feeling.

RYAN: What's cool about this is we get wide shots, medium shots, close-ups, all in different forms of decay, switching back and forth between CGI and a bunch of different puppet models.

JO: I would say so.

RYAN: There's even one right before it gets sucked out that is basically a trash bag with bones in it.

JO: The intestines flopping out as well.

RYAN: Intestines could just be make-up, but here I think they're puppeted because they're splooshing out and getting sucked back in.

JO: Lots of different ways to do this. This is clearly a team that respects the medium. It warms my heart to see physical objects.

RYAN: So this is the first we've seen that's a blend of puppetry with CGI. A lot of people struggle with the definition of CGI, what it means, and whether it counts as some sort of puppetry enabled by computer modeling.

JO: I'm surprised we haven't watched any stop motion. Animation can be puppetry, right? Characters embodied by armatures that move every frame. When you bring CGI into the mix, the question must be asked, is computer generated imagery puppets as well, is that kind of animation puppetry, and I would say no it isn't.

RYAN: The weird thing about it is, 2D animation is NOT like stop motion with articulated parts. It's an illusion of juxtaposition. You're not moving anything, you're replicating an image with slight adjustments. In that sense 3D animation is actually closer to stop motion because there are models that you articulate and move and develop in that way.

JO: Yeah, right! I think my luddite tendencies are showing their bias here. I can imagine a computer model being created, and how can I necessarily distinguish that from an armature? Armature in physical reality vs. armature on computer. The main difference is the immediate physical interaction. I guess what I'm coming to realize is that puppetry is an extremely malleable subject.

RYAN: It's a skillset that's so integrated with so many other aspects of production in theatre or film that it becomes hard to separate out.

JO: You can do something as simple as draw a face on a napkin and move it around and I'd call that a puppet, but for some reason I hesitate to allow a computer generated armature model figure that is on some kind of loop or automated. But, the animatronics at Chuck E' Cheese? I don't know. If I were to allow my full bias, I'd say a puppet needs to be operated in real time from an actual human. But then... stop motion isn't real time. God darn it. It might just be my generational bias, but I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to feel as sentimentally attached to something that I can easily perceive as being computer generated.

RYAN: It could be generational, but if it is obviously identifiable as coming from a computer, then it's not very good CGI. One of the films I considered for this post was Jurassic Park, which is a phenomenal example of CGI that is so well-integrated with physical puppetry that it creates something real, tactile, and tangible. Maybe the issue is bad CGI rather than CGI itself.

JO: I can imagine having sentimental feelings about a bad CGI character in a regular human world. But there's something about the hoodwinking aspect of CGI trying to fool us into thinking that it's natural.

RYAN: We're in an era of film that sees CGI as an expedient to the medium rather than a creative tool.

JO: I'm actually heartened by the fact that it's hard for us to come up with a clear definition of puppetry, because I'm a prop designer, and those things are starting to seem like an arbitrary distinction. Props are often puppets and puppets are always props.

RYAN: We're going for a very abstract Realm of Forms definition rather than a functional one.

JO: Um... Inanimate objects. Tangible. Or... goddamnit. That goddamnit was off the record. Inanimate objects, animated. Might be the simplest definition.

RYAN: Alright! That checks out with everything we saw.

JO: Oh! Inanimate objects, animated for the sake of storytelling. I would add that. The story being told with the moon, for example, is that the moon is alive.

RYAN: I like that because with that distinction we solve the rocket problem. Great, we figured it out. I'm sure as we ponder it over, we'll come up with a million exceptions, but I think that's a great, loose, flexible way to conceptualize the work that puppeteers do in film, theatre, storytelling, without being reductive. I didn't think that this would culminate in such a taxonomic investigation!

JO: Thanks for having me on the show!

RYAN: Thanks for making your way out here, to my studio.

JO: My pleasure.

RYAN: It was fun. Any final words?

JO: Yeah. All of you watching at home, I love you. No wait. I don't stand by that. It's off the record.