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Different Kinds of Puppetry


by Jerome Weeks 26 Aug 2009 9:49 AM

Over on the feature side, of course, we have a story about Matt Posey’s decidedly low-tech, trash-talking puppets. And this next week will see the opening of the fifth annual Cowtown Puppetry Festival & Pageant at the Hip Pocket Theatre (below), for a more poetic brand of puppetry. But the above, Casa de Maquinas (“the […]

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Over on the feature side, of course, we have a story about Matt Posey’s decidedly low-tech, trash-talking puppets. And this next week will see the opening of the fifth annual Cowtown Puppetry Festival & Pageant at the Hip Pocket Theatre (below), for a more poetic brand of puppetry.

But the above, Casa de Maquinas (“the House of Machines”) is a haunting and beautiful piece of marionette work from my new favorite, time-waster website, The Automata. If you check it out, I recommend “The Crocodile” (made of paper and a handy metaphor for our lives), the “Veilmetter” or drawing-clown tin-toy, the incredible, life-sized “War Horse” puppets for the hit London stage show about World War I, the comical migrating elephants, the Siegfried and Roy magic act, the rubber-band-firing robot, the cute mobile Toy Shop, the flying metal horse kinetic sculpture, Arthur Ganson’s TED lecture,  el Gran Gramendia magician, the “Chameleon Chronicles,” the androids in Junod’s Wonderland —

Oh hell, just run all the videos. I said it was a time-waster.

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  • Herb Levy

    The Automata site IS really great, but Casa de Maquinas isn’t any kind of marionette work.

    It’s a computer animation.

    • It IS??!? (Splashing early-morning coffee into eyes, screaming, running around, waking up, drying off, checking out original video.)

      Oh, OK. It is. You’re right.

      I thought when it said “stop-motion animation” that it just meant they stopped the machine parts at various times to animate the movement.

      Silly me. The thing does look too good to be true. But hell, the rest of the writing is in Italian.