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      Puppetry So Lifelike, Even Their Deaths Look Real

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      Members of the puppetry team for “Life of Pi” discuss making the show’s animals seem all-too-real on a very crowded lifeboat.Fair warning: This article is riddled with spoilers about puppet deaths in “Life of Pi,” the stage adaptation of Yann Martel’s best-selling novel about a shipwrecked teenager adrift on the Pacific Ocean. He shares his lifeboat first with a menagerie of animals from his family’s zoo in India — large-scale puppets all, requiring a gaggle of puppeteers — and eventually just with a magnificent, ravenous Royal Bengal tiger named Richard Parker that takes three puppeteers to operate.Now in previews on Broadway, where it is slated to open on March 30 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, the play picked up five Olivier Awards in London last year. Puppetry design by the longtime collaborators Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell was included with Tim Hatley’s set in one award, and, unprecedentedly, a team of puppeteers won an acting Olivier for playing Richard Parker.Caldwell, who is also the production’s puppetry director, and two of those Olivier-winning puppeteers, Fred Davis and Scarlet Wilderink, sat down at the Schoenfeld one morning last week to talk about bringing the show’s puppets to life — and then, in several scenes, to vivid and often gruesome death. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Foreground, from left: Fred Davis, Scarlet Wilderink and Finn Caldwell. Behind the tiger, from left: Andrew Wilson and Rowan Ian Seamus.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesIt’s a very crowded lifeboat. Who all is in there, and how complex is that dance?SCARLET WILDERINK That is such a beautiful way to describe good puppetry. Because it is a synchronicity like dance that looks completely unchoreographed. Well, what have we got in there? We’ve got hyena. Rat for a short time.FRED DAVIS Zebra. Orangutan. Tiger. And Pi.FINN CALDWELL In the end of the first act, where we see the tiger’s about to kill the hyena, and the hyena’s killed the zebra and everything else — we call that section Megadeath. How many puppeteers do we use in Megadeath?WILDERINK Three, five, six, eight, 11.CALDWELL Eleven puppeteers. That’s the most puppeteers we’ve ever used on a show in one sequence.Richard Parker is such a cat. He seems plush and furry with padded paws, and he hogs the bed. How do you figure out animal movement?CALDWELL We look at anatomy. We look at pictures of skeletons of tigers, blow that up to a real tiger size and start marking on pieces of paper on the wall where the joints are all going to be. Because when we build on a framework, our armature, it wants to move like a tiger, because the limbs are all the right length. The joints want to move in the right way.Hiran Abeysekera, left, as Pi, with Richard Parker, eventually the last surviving passengers aboard a lifeboat stranded in the Pacific Ocean.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesDAVIS In terms of bringing it to life, we start off by looking at videos of tigers moving in different environments — when they’re relaxed, when they’re hunting, analyzing their foot patterns and how their weight shifts from one paw to another, how their tail flicks when they’re feeling a certain way. One thing that is always challenging for us to do is the noises. Because no human has the same lung capacity or vocal cords as a tiger.WILDERINK One of the most helpful tools for us is imagination. If the puppeteer is really seeing the thing, the audience will see the thing. The tiger’s fur, you know, he doesn’t have real fur. But if you imagine the softness of it, this sort of stretchiness of their skin, the weight — like if he collapses into Pi, how do you make him look like he’s soft in his lap? It’s part of the design because we’ve got all those bungees that tie all of the armature together, which makes him look like that. But the sensory stuff, I think, is in our minds.What is it that makes the audience believe?CALDWELL It’s you and I as 3-year-olds going, “There’s a doll. Should we agree that this is real and play a game together?” That’s the same offer that you make to the audience: “Here’s a tiger. Do you want to agree that it’s real with us?” That means that they then take part in the creation. Intellectually, we know it’s a puppet. But really quickly, most people want to buy into the game.Why is violence sustained by puppet animals so shocking and affecting?CALDWELL If it was the real animal, you’d be really worried about the situation. You’d be like, “Is that a real hyena?” With a puppet, no matter what it’s playing, all you have to worry about is what it’s telling you onstage. The puppets are only there to be themselves, so that when you start to wound them, all the audience is thinking is, well, (a), I’ve taken part in bringing this thing to life, and now you’re killing it in front of me, and (b), this is all that’s happening. All you’re getting is the pure story, the pure thing that’s happening, and so I think you get the straight emotional connection to it.The puppetry team also built and operated a hyena, a zebra, a goat and an orangutan.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAnd yet you really do not expect to hear a puppet’s neck crack.WILDERINK It is so rare that you get to do something so grisly with puppets. That’s why I love it so much. If the zebra is being attacked, the orangutan is being killed, the goat’s being killed, I love hearing the audience react to it and then be surprised by their own reaction. Because they don’t realize how invested they are until it happens. They feel the shock and the pain of the orangutan dying, and then they’re surprised by the fact that they believed it so much.DAVIS One of my favorite things that’s happened: The goat’s head came detached from the goat’s body. Something got broken in there. Through that last scene in the zoo in Pondicherry, where the goat gets brought on and shoved in the tiger cage, the puppeteer’s doing a dutiful job of keeping the body and the head attached. And then we get in there and the goat gets attacked by the tiger. As the tiger, you don’t know that the head’s come off the goat. So the neck breaks, and then you see that it’s actually disconnecting. What we decided in the moment, we left with the body, left the head on the stage. The tiger went away, came back, picked up the head and then left. We spoke to the actors afterward and they were like, “I was crying. I’m scarred from seeing that happen. Why did you do that?” I’m like, “Well, you know, it’s a tiger.”Seven puppeteers who operated from “Life of Pi” shared the Olivier Award for best supporting actor in 2022.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesI’m wondering: What did winning the Olivier mean to you?DAVIS It was really big. It’s also really validating, because I think when you’re involved with the puppetry that we’ve done over the last few years, we believe and invest in these puppet characters as much as anyone would a human character.It’s acting, yes?DAVIS It is acting. But I think a lot of the time, from an outside perspective, it cannot be considered acting or judged as harshly as acting. We want people to be looking at it and considering it worthy of criticism. That’s what was so heartening: that what we were doing was believable enough that people wanted to judge it.WILDERINK I had people from all over the world — puppeteers, puppet theater companies — contacting me on social media, saying how many waves it’s created in their communities. It felt very special on a global scale.CALDWELL It was just amazing that the industry sat up and took notice. It mainly just feels like a door opened — and an invitation to what we can do next. More

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      For France’s Protesters, the Streets Are the Ultimate Stage

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      The country has a long history of demonstrations, which often feature overtly theatrical elements. Our Paris theater critic marched along on Tuesday to soak up the spectacle.In large-scale theater and dance works, bodies moving in space have a momentum of their own; their collective power often feels like it could move mountains. Yet no number of monumental performances can compare to the enveloping force of tens of thousands of people, announcing as they did in Paris this week: “We are the show.”Street protests — a time-honored French tradition — are generally not for the agoraphobic, but on Tuesday, the crowds were the biggest on record this century. France’s Interior Ministry estimated there were 1.28 million marchers, while trade unions said there were 3.5 million. In Paris, the crowds were so large that some protesters branched off on a different course, along the Left Bank.The mountain the protesters were trying to move, for the sixth time in two months, was President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise the legal age of retirement by two years, to 64. Yet beyond that particular policy, demonstrations are frequent enough in the country that they have taken on a ritualistic dimension, and often feature overtly theatrical elements designed to grab the attention.In late 2019, the Paris Opera Ballet made international headlines by performing an excerpt from “Swan Lake” in the cold outside the Palais Garnier, to protest a previous attempt at a pension overhaul. The Comédie-Française, France’s most prestigious theater company, joined in with a Molière performance from the theater’s windows and balcony. (Perhaps to avoid a repeat, both institutions’ bespoke pension arrangements are excluded from this year’s proposed changes.)Artists taking an active role in protests is nothing new in France. During the revolutionary events of May 1968, a number of theater venues were occupied, and performances were staged outdoors and at factories. One company from 1968 hasn’t stopped since: the Théâtre du Soleil. That egalitarian troupe, led by Ariane Mnouchkine, is such a stalwart of demonstrations that even protesters who rarely go to the theater look out for their creative street performances.At regular intervals during the protest on Tuesday, Mnouchkine gave the signal for a spectacle she called “the attack of the crows.”Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesOn Tuesday, its performers were easy to spot from afar, with a giant white puppet, known as Justice, that towered above the surrounding protesters. The slim figure was carried by four bearers on a palanquin, while the company’s actors animated its arms and billowing skirts from the sides. Blood was smeared on Justice’s solemn-looking face, which, like the rest of the puppet, was created by the Théâtre du Soleil’s own technical team.More on FranceRestoring Notre Dame: Experts are trying to revive the centuries-old acoustics of the cathedral, which caught fire in 2019. Here is how the building’s architecture plays a role in the endeavor.Trials by Fire: During her first year as France’s sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra faced chaos and scandals in soccer and rugby. With the Paris Olympics looming, her toughest days may be ahead.Art Invasion: Mosaics by a street artist who calls himself “Invader” have become part of the fabric of Paris. They are everywhere — if you look for them.A Staunch Protester: Jean-Baptiste Reddé has hoisted his colorful signs in nearly every street protest for over a decade, embodying France’s enduring passion for demonstrations.Mnouchkine herself, 84, kept a watchful eye on the proceedings. Justice was created in 2010, she said in an interview, for another strike against pension changes. The puppet has never appeared in a stage production, but she has seen her fair share of demonstrations, including in the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015. “We immediately felt that people were happy to have a symbol to rally around that wasn’t just a giant sound system,” she said. “They also want something beautiful, something that carries emotion.”At regular intervals, as the march plodded forward, Mnouchkine gave the signal for what she called “the attack of the crows.” Ten or so members of her company ran forward with black birds on sticks, ambushing Justice. To classical music and thunderous drum beats, Justice leaned forward, then back, fighting the crows off with a small sword; two assistant directors oversaw the struggle, directing the actors in real time. To the delight of protesters, Justice won every time, then took a celebratory spin and gave a bow.Marching not far from the Théâtre du Soleil, a street theater company called Les Grandes Personnes had also brought two oversize puppets, both regulars appearances in their shows: Céline, an older white woman, and K.S., a young Black man. Brought to life by one person each, they bounced along to the sound of horns and cheering marchers, while a nearby performer held a sign that said: “I don’t want to die onstage.”Yet artistic contributions to the march were fewer and farther between than I expected, an impression Mnouchkine confirmed. Two years of pandemic-related closures and cancellations have also left their mark, with fewer theaters willing to go on strike this week.A crow puppet carried by members of the feminist group Rosies.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPolice on the Place d’Italie, where the demonstration ended.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesPerformers from the street theater company Les Grandes Personnes at the demonstration on Tuesday.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesBringing theatrical craftsmanship to strikes is “a tradition that is getting lost,” she said. While one of the performing arts’ main unions, C.G.T. Spectacle, brought a truck equipped with musical instruments and a sound system, the performances seemed a little subdued.There was more attention to spectacle in the protest style of feminist groups like the Rosies, who draw their name from Norman Rockwell’s feminist icon Rosie the Riveter. Dressed in blue overalls, with makeup that made them look like overworked zombies, the women’s collective has developed a small repertoire of choreographed protest songs, which anyone can learn through videos or workshops.When I spotted them, dozens of Rosies were dancing to Gala’s 1990s hit “Freed From Desire,” which had become “Women On Fire,” with French lyrics about pension reform. From the back of a truck, two women led the motley group, which punched the air to the beat.It was a joyful flash mob, but the strike’s greatest piece of theater remained the spectacle of so many bodies in the streets of Paris — wave after wave, subsuming any individuals, claiming the city as their stage for the day. Many chanted and held signs, but the vast majority simply moved as a collective.Demonstrators on Tuesday protested, for the sixth time in two months, President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to raise France’s legal retirement age.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesMost of the time, there was a warm, carnivalesque atmosphere, but a crowd’s mood can also change at the speed of light. Nearly four hours into the march, some people around me suddenly stood still, then started walking backward. Something in the air had shifted, as if a coup de théâtre were about to change the narrative; press photographers near me took out their safety helmets.Minutes later, when the sea of people parted, it became clear a group of black-clad protesters, their faces hidden, were ready to face off violently with the rows of police officers on the other side of the boulevard. I hurried back to a less volatile area. Later, when I reached the end point of the march, the Place d’Italie plaza was hazy with tear gas and surrounded by police officers, with people streaming confusedly into the few streets that weren’t blocked.It was a staggering sight, like an immersive show gone out of control. Yet the march also brought out communal emotions, together with a sense of freedom and open self-expression, that even the best theater can struggle to replicate. As collective experiences go, I won’t forget this one any time soon. More

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      Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

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      David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      ‘The Immortal Jellyfish Girl’ Review: A 26th-Century Love Story

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      Featuring a lobster telephone and a robot boy with wings, this puppet romance set in a future post-ecological collapse succeeds on its own weird terms.The first time Bug and Aurelia kiss is as romantic as can be, even if Bug has to get past his initial reaction. “That really hurts,” he says. “That stings so much!” Which is what you get when smooching a part-jellyfish humanoid.Aurelia is the title character of “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl,” though if 23andMe still exists in her postapocalyptic world, it might locate traces of kangaroo, frog, naked mole rat and other beasties in her makeup. Above all, “she is also 100 percent puppet,” as the narrator, a mischievous masked fox in shorts and red tails, informs us.Kirjan Waage and Gwendolyn Warnock’s play, devised with help from the ensemble and presented by Wakka Wakka Productions and the Norwegian company Nordland Visual Theater at 59E59 Theaters, is indeed a puppet show, and an ambitious one at that. It’s not just that the story is set in a poetically rendered 2555, but that Waage and Warnock, who also directed, blithely ignored the memo about coddling young audiences: Their show, for viewers age 10 and up, does not shy from the violence and death intertwined with life, and indeed several characters meet a tragic ending.We are on a future Earth that has been wrecked by ecological disaster and where humans have evolved into two groups at war with each other: the machine-enhanced Homo technalis and Homo animalis, who are mixed with animals. If you have any kind of familiarity with stories of star-crossed young lovers, it won’t come as a surprise to learn that Bug (voiced by Alexander Burnett at the performance I attended) is part of the first group while Aurelia (voiced by Dorothy James) is an Animalis. And not just any Animalis: She has the ability to generate polyps that grow into various animals, thus providing a ray of hope for a dying planet. The Fox (Waage) explains that “she is the first living DNA bank in the world.” (The title is inspired by the so-called immortal jellyfish, a real species that somehow can age in reverse.)As if ecological devastation weren’t enough, Bug and Aurelia must also deal with the machinations of the disembodied Technalis ruler, Doyenne, a featureless head floating above her lair.Like the earlier Wakka Wakka/Nordland collaboration “Baby Universe: A Puppet Odyssey” (2010), the production revolves around environmental concerns, which it mines with humor, emotion and storytelling verve — the Fox is prone to breaking the fourth wall and making jokes aimed at the adults in the crowd. (“Where are the clones? Send in the clones.”)Admittedly, it’s not always easy to follow, and the action hits some confusing potholes near the end, but “The Immortal Jellyfish Girl” does create an eerie, slightly morbid universe packed with bold strokes: a Lovecraftian squid and a lobster telephone that could have been dreamed up by Salvador Dalí; Bug suddenly sprouting a pair of wings from his back; Aurelia surrounded by odd animal forms floating in individual tanks. The sonic imagination is just as refined, with the composer and sound designer Thor Gunnar Thorvaldsson consistently delivering an array of expressive effects — he digitally assembled prerecorded vocals into a composite to create Doyenne’s voice, for example. Even if you can’t figure out what the heck that prophecy is all about or what’s meant to happen to Earth at the end, the show succeeds on its own weird terms.The Immortal Jellyfish GirlThrough Feb. 12 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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      For ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,’ a Star Built From Tiny Gears and 3-D Printing

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      The studio behind stop-motion hits like ‘Coraline’ and ‘Fantastic Mr. Fox’ started work on the new film in 2008 but had to wait for the technology to catch up.From its earliest stages of development more than 15 years ago, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” was envisioned as a stop-motion production. The director explained, “It was clear to me that the film needed to be done in stop-motion to serve the story about a puppet that lives in a world populated by other puppets who think they are not puppets.”He also knew that key members of the cast had to be built by the British studio Mackinnon and Saunders. “They are the best in the world,” he said in a recent video interview. “The starring roles of the movie needed to be fabricated by them.” As the producer Lisa Henson put it, “They do things that other puppet builders do not have the patience or the expertise to do.”“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is the latest example of the efflorescence of stop-motion animation. For decades, the technique was overshadowed by the more expressive drawn animation and, later, by computer-generated imagery. But new technologies have allowed artists to create vivid performances that rival other media.Artists and technicians at Mackinnon and Saunders pushed stop-motion technology in an entirely new direction for “Corpse Bride” (2005) by inventing systems of tiny gears that fit inside puppets’ heads. The animators adjusted the gears between frames to create subtle expressions: Victor, the title character’s groom, could raise an eyebrow or lift the edge of his lip in the start of smile. This technique also enlivened “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (2009) and “Frankenweenie” (2012).“Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro will bring us the story, then give us the space to say, ‘What can we do with these puppet characters? Let’s find something new to do,’” said Ian Mackinnon, a founder of the firm.Mackinnon and Saunders’ credits include, from left, “Corpse Bride,” “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Frankenweenie.” Warner Bros.; Fox Searchlight; DisneyHe likened the mechanics inside puppet heads to components of a Swiss watch. “Those heads are not much bigger than a ping-pong ball or a walnut,” he said, explaining that the animator moves the gears by putting a tiny tool into the character’s ear or the top of its head. “The gears are linked to the puppet’s silicone skin, enabling the animator to create the nuances you see on a big cinema screen,” he said.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.The introduction of geared heads was part of a series of overlapping waves of innovation in stop-motion that brought visuals to the screen that had never been possible. Nick Park and the artists at the British Aardman Animations sculpted new subtleties into clay animation in “Creature Comforts” (1989) and “The Wrong Trousers” (1993). Meanwhile, Disney’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) showcased the new technology of facial replacement. A library of three-dimensional expressions was sculpted and molded for each character; an animator snapped out one section of the face and replaced it with a slightly different one between exposures. Then the Portland, Ore.-based Laika Studios pushed this technique further, using 3-D printing to create faces, beginning with “Coraline” (2009).For “Pinocchio,” which debuted on Netflix a few months after Disney released Robert Zemeckis’s partly animated version of the story, most of the puppets were built at ShadowMachine in Portland, where most of the film was shot. Candlewick, the human boy Pinocchio befriends in the film, “has threads set into the corners of his mouth which are attached to a double-barreled gear system,” explained Georgina Hayns, an alumna of Mackinnon and Saunders who was director of character fabrication at ShadowMachine. “If you turn the gear inside the ear clockwise, it pulls the upper thread and creates a smile. If you turn it anticlockwise, it pulls a lower thread which produces a frown. It really is amazing.”That was the result of a process that began in 2008, when the Mackinnon and Saunders team made some early prototypes. “By the time Netflix greenlit the film in 2018, we were ready and waiting,” Mackinnon said. “If we’d tried to do ‘Pinocchio’ 10 or 15 years ago, the technology wouldn’t have been there.”Georgina Hayns served as director of character fabrication for the film.Jason Schmidt/NetflixAlthough mechanical heads are used for most of the key characters in the film, Pinocchio himself was animated with replacement faces. Because he has to look like he’s made of wood, he needed to have a hard surface, the animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen said, explaining that 3,000 of the faces were printed. “His expressions are snappy; the mechanical faces look softer and more fluid compared to Pinocchio. He’s built differently and animated in a different way to set him apart.”The character is the first metal 3-D-printed puppet, Hansen said. Because he’s skinny, “the only way they could make him strong enough was to print the puppet in metal. He’s a strong little guy, quite difficult to break. The animators loved animating him.”Thanks to a team of engineers and the puppet designer Richard Pickersgill, “we’ve moved the replacement technology forward a little bit,” Mackinnon said. The designer “gave Pinocchio spindly limbs and joints that look like Geppetto carved them by hand.”The studio spent a year and a half prototyping Pinocchio before making the first production model. Eventually more than 20 puppets were built to ensure the animators had enough.Several versions of Pinocchio were made for the film. via Mackinnon & Saunders; Jason Schmidt/NetflixThe studio has made figures as big as the “life-sized” Martians in “Mars Attacks” (1996), but most stop-motion puppets are about the size of Barbie dolls — Pinocchio is 9.5 inches tall. The sophisticated creations meant del Toro and his co-director, Mark Gustafson, could get the performances they needed. They looked for inspiration to the films of Hayao Miyazaki, whose characters think, pause and change their minds as they move.“I had a road-to-Damascus moment watching ‘My Neighbor Totoro’ where the father tries to put his shoe on: He misses it twice, then gets it on the third try,” del Toro explained. “Miyazaki says if you animate the ordinary, it will be extraordinary. So we went for failed acts because we wanted to breathe life into these characters.”He estimated that 35 shots had to be redone because “we said, ‘The character is moving, but I don’t see the character thinking or feeling.’ The little failed gestures or hesitations before a movement tell you, ‘This is a living character.’”Gustafson said that failed gestures were especially difficult “because the intention has to be visible — it’s not actually a mistake. I think our brains are really wired to recognize when a gesture is false somehow, so we worked really hard at getting those things to feel as natural as we could.”Replacement faces were used for Pinocchio to make his expressions look snappy. By contrast, characters with mechanical gears like Count Volpe had a softer look.NetflixArtists can change or rework computer-generated and 2-D animation during production, but once stop-motion animators begin moving a puppet, they have to continue to the end of the scene — or start over. They can’t alter what they’ve already filmed, any more than an actor can stop midstride, walk backward a few steps and cross the set differently.“Stop-motion is the art form in animation that is most analogous to live-action, because you are doing real movement, from point A to point B,” del Toro said. “You cannot edit. You’re dealing with real sets and real props, lit by real light. Stop-motion is to live-action what Ginger Rogers is to Fred Astaire: We do the same steps, backwards in high heels.” More

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      An adaptation of “My Neighbour Totoro” enchants audiences at the Barbican. Across town at the Harold Pinter Theater, a revival of “Good” takes viewers to darker territory.LONDON — Who’d have thought an enormous mound of fur would be the most endearing sight on the London stage? I’m referring to the outsize woodland creature of the title in “My Neighbour Totoro,” who is eliciting gasps of surprise and delight at the Barbican Theater through Jan. 21.Making an entrance well into the first act, this piece of larger-than-life fluff — a puppet controlled from within by people we don’t see — brings an immediate sense of excitement to this adaptation of the beloved 1988 animated film of the same name, a banner work from Studio Ghibli of Japan. Reworked for the stage by Tom Morton-Smith, it has arrived as a Royal Shakespeare Company production; the play’s composer, Joe Hisaishi, gets an executive producer credit.The movie, directed by Hayao Miyazaki, overcame some sniffy early reviews and is now regarded as a classic for the studio, whose subsequent “Spirited Away” won the Oscar for animation in 2003. (A theatrical “Spirited Away” opened earlier this year in Japan.)The challenge with “My Neighbour Totoro” was to amplify a sweet but slender movie running less than 90 minutes whose enchanting visuals could seem a stretch for the stage. In fact, as directed by Phelim McDermott, who divides his career between theater and opera, this tale of two sisters displaced to rural Japan in the 1950s exerts its own distinct magic.You share the characters’ sense of expectation as 10-year-old Satsuki and her 4-year-old sister, Mei, adjust to their new home in the countryside. Their father has moved the family from Tokyo to be nearer to the girls’ mother, who is hospitalized with an unspecified but serious illness.Nino Furuhata in “My Neighbour Totoro.”Manuel HarlanThe siblings’ imaginations soon run riot as they discover any number of creatures — including “soot sprites” resembling dancing particles of dust — that the adults around them can’t see. The show’s visual invention honors the animal kingdom, and the puppeteer Basil Twist and his hardworking team spring one enchantment after another on the audience. (The puppets are the glorious handiwork of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.) The emphasis throughout is on the characters’ surroundings befitting Miyazaki, a lifelong environmentalist: The woods are sites of enchantment and discovery, not places marked out by dread or fear, and Tom Pye’s flexible set shifts locations with ease.Any potential cutesiness is kept at bay. Ami Okumura Jones and Mei Mac, both adults, play the girls with a zestful appetite for experience that never turns cloying, and Dai Tabuchi is infinitely touching as their kindly father.You could argue that the ending feels rushed and unconvincing, as if the creators were overeager to deny the threat of mortality that takes center stage as the health of the girls’ mother (Haruka Abe) worsens. The darkening of the narrative then does an abrupt about-face in time for a pat feel-good finish that is the play’s only misstep. But by that point, the audience has long since given itself over to the giddy parade of puppets, from some sweetly entrancing butterflies that seem to dance in the air to the gleaming Catbus, an automotive creature that, after Totoro, is probably the best-remembered character of the film.The Royal Shakespeare Company hasn’t produced a show of such commercial potential since the musical “Matilda” over a decade ago — coming to Netflix in a film adaptation this holiday season. Like “Matilda,” “My Neighbour Totoro” is family entertainment that adults might like even more than children.The kindness, empathy and generosity of spirit that “My Neighbour Totoro” evokes are infectious. But it’s the capacity for evil that drives a West End revival of “Good,” a 1982 play by C.P. Taylor. (That Scottish playwright died the year before the play’s premiere by, yes, the Royal Shakespeare Company.) The current production, from the director Dominic Cooke, runs at the Harold Pinter Theater through Dec. 24.From left, Elliot Levey, David Tennant and Sharon Small in “Good” at the Harold Pinter Theater.Johan PerssonThe protagonist is a mild-seeming German academic, John Halder (David Tennant), whom we first encounter in Frankfurt, in 1933. Antisemitism is rising in Germany, but Halder seems more preoccupied with domestic issues. Early on, he reassures his close friend Maurice (Elliot Levey), a Jewish psychiatrist, that any worries about the gathering climate of fear can be put to one side: Targeting Jews, he says, “is not practical,” given their importance to Germany’s economy and society, so there’s little cause for alarm. In any case, Halder is too busy navigating an extramarital affair and a mother with dementia to pay much heed to history’s horrific onward march.The author’s cunning across two brisk hours is to chart an apparently decent man’s decline into moral depravity: What begins as casual indifference ends up as active participation. The sight of Halder, in full SS uniform, standing at the ready at Auschwitz is followed by a climactic visual coup de théâtre that comes as a genuine shock.The production is forbiddingly spare and unfolds on a minimal monochrome set, from Vicki Mortimer, that eerily evokes a mausoleum. Tom Gibbons’s invaluable sound design brings out the full horror of Kristallnacht, with shattering windows, heard but not seen, contrasting with the clinking glasses we heard earlier in the show, at a time when civility seemed possible.Cooke, the director, has pared the cast back to three actors, with Levey and the female lead, Sharon Small, deftly playing multiple roles. The decision to conjoin some parts heightens an awareness of Halder’s tenuous purchase on reality, as if his wayward thoughts were tumbling from his mother to his wife to his lover, with Small taking all those parts and a further, altogether different one as well.This “Good” wouldn’t be anywhere near as good as it is without Tennant, a TV name (“Doctor Who”) and stage regular whose likability puts you in Halder’s corner at the start. Speaking in his natural Scottish accent, Tennant initially gives off the air of a genial bookworm with whom you might discuss Goethe over a drink. But by the time he is staring the audience down in full Nazi regalia, you’re reeling from a portrait of psychosis whose shivery power is hard to shake.My Neighbour Totoro. Directed by Phelim McDermott. Barbican Theater, through Jan. 21.Good. Directed by Dominic Cooke. Harold Pinter Theater, through Dec. 24. More

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      in Television

      Jules Bass, Co-Producer of TV Holiday Staples, Is Dead at 87

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      The animation company he ran with Arthur Rankin Jr. gave the world “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Frosty the Snowman” and much more.Jules Bass, who created an animation empire with his business partner, Arthur Rankin Jr., that produced perennial Christmastime television favorites like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” and “Frosty the Snowman,” died on Tuesday in Rye, N.Y. He was 87.His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Jennifer Ruff, whose mother was Mr. Bass’s first wife.The Rankin/Bass studio was a major force in animated programming, mostly on television, from the early 1960s to the late ’80s. Some of its TV shows and movies used traditional hand-drawn cel animation, but it carved out a separate specialty in the stop-motion puppet animation familiar to viewers since “Gumby” in the 1950s.Rankin/Bass’s stop-motion specials included “Rudolph” (1964), featuring the voice of the folk singer Burl Ives as Sam the Snowman;“Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town” (1970), with Fred Astaire as the narrator and Mickey Rooney as the voice of Kris Kringle; and “Jack Frost” (1979), with Robert Morse voicing the title role.“Frosty” (1969), narrated by Jimmy Durante, used traditional animation.To create the stop-motion effect, animators in Japan painstakingly shot thousands of pictures of the tiniest movements and gestures of inches-tall puppets. When run at 24 frames a second, the images generated a whimsical sort of herky-jerky animation that became the Rankin/Bass signature.“When I saw their cartoons, they left a great impression on me because they had dimensionality versus drawn animation,” said Tom Gasek, a professor in the school of film and animation at the Rochester Institute of Technology who was inspired by Rankin/Bass’s work to become a stop-motion animator. “They were not high quality by any means, but they were charming and their designs were very smart.”Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin were often credited as the directors of their work and offered input on scripts and storyboards. But they played different roles at the company, said Rick Goldschmidt, the studio’s official historian.Mr. Bass composed much of the music. He hired and worked closely with the musical supervisor, Maury Laws, and ran the company’s business in Manhattan while Mr. Rankin was in Japan supervising the animation.“Where Jules is really the star of Rankin/Bass is as a songwriter and his partnership with Maury,” Mr. Goldschmidt said in a phone interview.Mr. Rankin, who was the studio’s chief executive, also sold the shows to TV networks and made sure they were delivered on time.“After a while, we were never seen together — I’d be doing production in Tokyo and he’d be recording a soundtrack in New York,” Mr. Rankin said in an interview in 2003 with the Museum of Television and Radio, now the Paley Center for Media. “If we were together, one of us wasn’t necessary.”Mr. Bass was rarely quoted publicly, and little is known about his private life. But the two partners spoke during a joint interview with The New York Times in 1982 when their animated theatrical feature, “The Last Unicorn,” was released.When they were asked who did most of the directing — the movie credits both of them — they initially said they did it together.“Anything he can do, I can do better,” Mr. Rankin said.Mr. Bass countered: “He never worked a day on the film. I did everything.”Peter S. Beagle, who wrote the screenplay for “The Last Unicorn” and the novel it was based on, recalled in a phone interview that his dealings with Mr. Bass “were very professional.” But, he added, “he was very private, and I never had a true sense of what was going on deepest in his head.”He added, “I’m grateful that the film came out pretty much as I wrote it.”Arthur Rankin Jr., left, and Mr. Bass in 1965. Both men were credited as producers and directors of their TV specials, but Mr. Bass was more involved with the music and Mr. Rankin with the animation.Miser Bros. Press/Rick Goldschmidt ArchivesJulius Bass was born in Philadelphia on Sept. 16, 1935. His father, Max, was a wholesale beer salesman, and his mother, Bernice (Palat) Bass, was a homemaker.He attended New York University, where he studied marketing from 1952 to 1954, but he did not graduate. He was hired by Gardner Advertising in Manhattan, where he met Mr. Rankin, who was making TV commercials under the banner of his company, Videocraft International.Mr. Bass joined Videocraft in the mid-1950s, and the two men produced commercials, occasionally using animation, for agencies that represented clients including General Electric and the A.&P. supermarket chain. They wearied of commercial production and shifted to animation in 1960 with a TV series, “The New Adventures of Pinocchio,” which used the stop-motion technique Mr. Bass had discovered in Japan.The company eventually changed its name to Rankin/Bass, and its work toggled between stop-motion and traditional cel animation.Although Rankin/Bass was best known for its Christmas programs, it also made TV movies like “The Ballad of Smokey the Bear” (1966), which was narrated by James Cagney,; “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” (1971); and “The Hobbit” (1977), which earned a Peabody Award. They also produced animated TV series like “King Kong” (1966), “The Reluctant Dragon & Mr. Toad Show” (1970), the “Jackson 5ive” (1971),“TigerSharks” (1985) and “Thundercats” (1987).Mr. Bass and Mr. Rankin ended their partnership in the late 1980s after their company was acquired by Lorimar-Telepictures, which was subsequently bought by Warner Communications, which is now Warner Bros. Discovery. Mr. Rankin died in 2014.Mr. Bass later wrote three children’s books. “Herb the Vegetarian Dragon” and “Cooking With Herb the Vegetarian Dragon,” illustrated by Debbie Harter, were both published in 1999. “The Mythomaniacs” (2013), with illustrations by Lawrence Christmas, is about a teenage magician who sends a group of readers of his father’s fairy tales into the books as characters.He also wrote an adult novel, “Headhunters” (2001), about four women from New Jersey who go to Monte Carlo and pretend to be among the world’s wealthiest women. It was adapted into a 2011 film, “Monte Carlo,” starring Selena Gomez.Mr. Bass leaves no immediate survivors. His daughter, Jean Nicole Bass, died this year. His marriages to Renee Fisherman and Sylvia Bass ended in divorce.The power of two of Rankin/Bass’s best-known productions has reverberated for decades since they were released: Both “Rudolph” and “Frosty” remain highly rated cornerstones of CBS’s pre-Christmas programming.In 2014, CBS promoted “Rudolph” on its 50th anniversary with ads that used stop motion to show the renowned reindeer and Sam the Snowman walking around the network’s backlot, meeting the stars of some of its other shows, including Mayim Bialik of “The Big Bang Theory” and Michael Weatherly of “NCIS.”“They’re the fabric of our Christmas hearth, the wood in the Christmas fire,” George Schweitzer, CBS’s former president of marketing, said in a phone interview. “You knew Christmas was coming when Rudolph and Frosty showed up on CBS.” More

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      in Theater

      Is Little Amal Getting Lost in New York?

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      Parading down the middle of West 63rd Street last Saturday afternoon, we were following a giant puppet — a whole crowd of us, trekking along behind Little Amal.The 12-foot-tall Syrian refugee child, a creation of the renowned Handspring Puppet Company, was en route to Lincoln Center to greet more of her public, who would throng the wide plaza there to catch a glimpse of her with their own eyes, and capture proof of the encounter on their phones.Fueled by a savvy social media campaign — and surely also by recent headlines about migrants and asylum seekers being bused and flown north by Republican governors — Little Amal is the hottest celebrity in New York right now, drawing masses of admirers to her dozens of scheduled appearances.Since last year she has traveled across Europe, a sympathetic, high-profile emblem of the global migrant crisis. Her current 19-day tour of these five boroughs lasts only until Oct. 2, and as always with in-demand visitors, the time limit adds to her cachet.Making connections: Amal is in town through Oct. 2 and will be visiting all five boroughs over her 19-day stay in the city.For me, a puppetry fan with an interest in political theater, Little Amal — who is operated by one puppeteer strapped into stilts inside her torso and two others controlling her arms — should have been an almost automatic fascination. And yet she left me cold when I first went to scope her out, on Fifth Avenue in front of the New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, on Sept. 15, the day after she arrived. Even when she bent down to cuddle Patience, one of the famous marble lions, I was unmoved.Amal is a 10-year-old, but with her gargantuan hands and forceful jaw, she reminded me of one of those paintings of a child before painters figured out that children weren’t merely miniature adults. Worse, the event felt like barely more than a photo op. I wondered if she is truly meant to be experienced in person — if, in fact, she counts as theater — or if the main purpose of this wordless puppet is to be an object, recorded in photos and videos in glamorous locations that people all over the world will recognize.Then, last weekend, my heart abruptly cracked wide open. On that tree-lined stretch of West 63rd Street, the brass band accompanying Amal broke into a festive rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and she began to dance as she walked along. It was a gentle, reveling bounce, and it made her utterly enchanting.In Central Park last weekend, spectators of all ages followed Amal.Later that day, her path cleared by a police escort, Amal led another procession up Central Park West. As her band played, we trooped along in the street — grown-ups, little kids riding on shoulders, the occasional dog. The mood was buoyant, happy, kind.There is something to be said for what is, in effect, a citywide party in honor of a refugee — even if she is merely a puppet, even if she is so well-connected that St. Ann’s Warehouse helped to bring her here. Symbolic behavior matters.Up ahead, Amal’s long brown hair swayed in the breeze, adorned with a bright red ribbon that was a beacon for those farther back. A thought crossed my mind that took me entirely by surprise. Although I was raised Roman Catholic, I’m not religious, and definitely not accustomed to bits of Bible verses floating through my consciousness.Still, there it was, inescapably, a line from Isaiah: “and a little child shall lead them.”Gulp.This, of course, is the point of Little Amal — to use the visceral power of puppetry, and of theater at its most disarming, to make us feel, and cajole us into considering what we owe to the most vulnerable among us. And ultimately, presumably, to act on that moral imperative.She was greeted at Lincoln Center on Sept. 17.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesBut it is so easy for any message to get lost on the grand stage set that is New York, and maybe even more so when collaborations with the city’s cultural institutions can come across as mutually promotional opportunities, bereft of substance. When Amal visited Lincoln Center, she seemed more like a dignitary granting an audience than a child ambassador for a cause. Her context had disappeared; without it she registered as a buzzy spectacle, one you want to be able to say you saw.Still, the visuals were terrific — musicians serenading her from the balcony of the Metropolitan Opera House — and people strained to get near her, to touch those enormous hands. It is astonishing when she gets really close, looming right above you. Looking up, all you see is her huge face, with those big, brown, blinking eyes. (Makes a great photo, actually.)I followed Amal late on Sunday morning to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where the vast front doorway posed no obstacle to her height, and where the lyrics of one hymn were particularly apt — not so much for her but for the rest of us: “Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, that you do unto me.”Some people are seeking out Amal around town, while others, instantly smitten, seem to be ditching their plans to tag along.And I followed her early on Monday morning to Coney Island, Brooklyn, where she wandered the wooden boardwalk forlornly, peering through the gates of rides not open just then for customers. The carnival colors popped, the moody clouds cast a flattering light and when she looked over the side of a pier into the water, the sound was of crashing waves and clicking shutters.If it seemed contrived — which, to be fair, it was; this was theater — there was no feigning the interest in her as she strode along with a gathering entourage, while a persistent drone hovered unnervingly overhead. Some people had made the pilgrimage to see Amal; others, like a smitten woman in a one-piece swimsuit and pink bathing cap, seemed to have ditched their beach plans to tag along.Amal’s performance that night, with its narrative of a weary child’s peregrination through Dumbo to the glass-walled carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park, should have been delicate and gorgeous. But from the moment she set off from the walk’s starting point, a triangle in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, something was wrong.In Coney Island, on Sept. 19, Amal found the space she needed to stand out as she strode along with a gathering entourage. But later that night, in Dumbo, the crowd overwhelmed her event.It wasn’t only that the hundreds of us were too many for the narrow cobblestone streets; the spirit of the evening was off, too. In that most Instagrammable of the city’s neighborhoods, the focus of the crowd was palpably on getting the shot — and Amal, in that lighting, did look glorious. (She stopped, lingeringly, in precisely the ultra-photogenic spot that’s illustrated on the cover of the current issue of The New Yorker.)But this wasn’t the joyous welcome of an attentive audience; it felt like a flash mob that had gotten out of hand. And when we reached the carousel — an elevated and brilliantly illuminated space that should have made an ideal stage — it was so surrounded by people that the performance was impossible to see unless you were up front. Even being 12 feet tall couldn’t help Amal there.The creepiest thing about that evening’s walk, though, was the sense that allegiance had been replaced by pursuit. It had the feeling of a hunt, with the puppet refugee as quarry. People jostled for position, cut in front of one another, tried to anticipate where Amal was going and get there first.And so I wonder, a little worriedly, with Saturday’s walk across the Brooklyn Bridge coming right up: Are we ruining Little Amal for ourselves?There may be no solution to the problem of the sheer numbers she draws, especially when the vistas promise to be breathtaking. But one tenet of theater suggests a way to better experience her live.Be present.Shoot a few photos if you like, a snippet of video. But mostly, just put down your camera, put away your phone. Be there, in the moment, walking with her. And feel. More