Puppet cartoon
A puppet cartoon is a film for which puppets are changed frame by frame and thus recorded individually in order to move smoothly in the finished film ( stop motion ). The puppet trick film does not include puppet films or other films in which the puppeteer acts in "real time" or can even be seen in the picture. The size of the scene is based on the scale of the dolls.
Manufacturing technology
The heads of the dolls are mostly carved from wood, but can also be made of paper mache , hard plaster or a solid plastic. However, especially in the case of a dialogue or monologue of the characters, this leads to a great deal of effort in production, as either a large number of different heads must be available to change facial expressions or the mouth or eye area must be interchangeable.
The “skeletons” of the dolls mostly consist of metal or steel ball joint fittings. In addition, dolls with wire skeletons and clay figures can also be used. It is important that the joints of the dolls allow the animator enough freedom to carry out all movements relatively lifelike. At the same time, however, it must also be ensured that each time you take a picture, they stay where they are, i.e. the position of the individual limbs does not change too much. After each shot, the figure's posture must be changed minimally in the direction of the desired overall movement. In order not to make this already very tedious process longer, the dolls are often fixed with pins or screws so as not to fall over. This animation technique offers a special advantage through the possibility of any positioning of the camera, as well as the execution of pans, camera movements or zooms.
The puppet cartoon is not to be confused with the puppetoon , which uses static puppets.
history
The puppet animation is one of the oldest cinema inventions. His first master was the Pole Wladislaw Alexandrowitsch Starewitsch (1882-1965), who worked in Russia since 1910 and in France from 1920 and whose animation is of a perfection and fluidity that is still unmatched today.
In Germany, the brothers Ferdinand (1901–1992) and Hermann Diehl (1906–1983) established themselves in this field, and in 1937 they created the first full-length German puppet film with The Seven Ravens . Further puppet cartoons by the two were u. a. The race between the hare and the hedgehog according to the Brothers Grimm (1938/39), The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats (1939) as well as Puss in Boots (1940) and The Storming of a Medieval City (1943/50). The Mecki children's short films were made in the 1950s .
After the Second World War, other homesteads of puppet animation were the animation studios of the Eastern Bloc countries , especially Poland ( Tadeusz Wilkosz and others), the ČSSR ( Jiří Trnka and others) and the GDR , from which well-known cartoon puppets like the sandman , which is still popular today, came from. In the 1970s and 1980s, there were also some puppet cartoon series for children in the West, such as the series Die Moomins, filmed in a Polish-Austrian co-production from 1978 to 1982 . Since the 1990s, the creations of Nick Parks Aardman animation studio like Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the sheep are the best known representatives of this genre.
Nowadays, puppet animation ekes out a niche existence in children's television programs, even if Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas 1993 and the films by Aardman Animations were above average. Another example is Suzie Templeton's short film Peter and the Wolf from 2006. More recently, the puppet animation aesthetic has been revived in purely computer-animated films (e.g. in Toy Story , The Magic Roundabout ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Rolf Giesen: Lexicon of the trick and animation film. From Aladdin, Akira and Sindbad to Shrek, Spider-Man and South Park. Films and characters, series and artists, studios and technology - the great world of animated films. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf. 2003 p. 348
- ^ "And the Oscar goes to ... Peter & the Wolf" (arthaus-musik.com) ( Memento of the original from November 3, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. viewed November 19, 2010
