The Midnight Diaries of Catty Wampus

(note: this post is part of the Here Come The Puppets category here at the Midnight Diaries. Be sure to check out the full category for other selections from this spectacular program)

For today’s installment, we’ll be looking at a little snippet from the Mermaid Theatre, which I’m pleased to see is still operating and quite successful. If you’re ever up near Nova Scotia you should check them out. As a matter of fact, their website lists some tour dates in the United States and South Korea so they may be coming to your town. Here’s a look at what they were up to back in 1981:

In the last post in this series, I talked a little about how contrast between two characters can help make an interaction more compelling. Here we have two characters with several visual distinctions that are immediately obvious: one is large and the other is small, one is darkly colored and the other is brighter, one is dressed in decorative robes and feathers and the other is hardly wearing anything.

You can also tell from the way the characters act that they are pretty different. The larger character is mostly silent and contemplative, and the smaller one is more of a bombastic little motormouth. If I asked a stranger to guess which of these characters prone to meditation and which was prone to tantrums, I doubt anyone would ever confuse the two.

The bigger issue to point out in this clip, however, is the way that the larger puppet is able to communicate and act even though the face stays in the same expression the entire time.

Eyeline is a huge deal when it comes to characters interacting with each other. The smallest move of the eyes can mean the difference between a character looking directly at a friend or a thousand miles into the distance over their shoulder. Where CG animation is concerned, it’s not always as simple as placing an eye target at the place you want your character to look–sometimes the eye target will be spot on, but from the camera’s view the character will be looking in the absolute wrong place.

When you’re performing on stage, you have an audience in place of a camera. I have heard that actors are often directed not to look directly at each other but rather to turn 45-degrees and look forward, essentially facing as if they are both addressing a third person. To the actor this must feel incredibly awkward, but the audience will see the two characters addressing each other naturally.

The same thing is going on here with the large character’s eyeline. Especially with a character that doesn’t have the ability to move its irises (most puppets don’t, after all), the head angle is all you have to rely on. And yet, look at how clearly this character addresses his focus:

The puppeteer, Donald, also mentions that subtle gestures in the hands are an immense help for getting the character to clearly illustrate his dialogue and the context in the scene. The use of hands and fingers is a subject which is way too broad to begin to explore at the moment, but if you watch the video again, you can see how clearly even the tiniest moves of the fingers can be read, even though the fingers are as thick as Twinkies on the ends of those gigantic hands.

To be perfectly honest, however, my favorite thing in this clip has nothing to do with puppetry. My absolute favorite thing in this clip is what happens when Donald takes off his puppet’s head. Check it out:

What a smile!

From an animator’s perspective, I love the way he has that “O” shaped mouth indicating “Boy am I glad to be out from under that sweltering head!” and then it becomes this big toothy grin that takes up almost the entire bottom half of his face. But even if I wasn’t thinking about animation at all, it’s a wonderful smile that is warm and charming and it seems to radiate that this is a genuine and friendly guy. Wherever he is these days, I hope he’s happy and still smiling.

Next up: Master Russian puppeteer, Sergei Obrotzov. Stay tuned!