1 of 3 | A skeksis stars in “The Dark Crystal,” returning to theaters Sunday. Photo courtesy of The Jim Henson Company
Jim Henson Company chair Brian Henson says his father’s 1982 film The Dark Crystal, returning to theaters Sunday via Fathom Entertainment, initiated the company’s incorporation of animatronic techniques into their puppetry.
Jim Henson created The Muppets, Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock as a puppeteer. For The Dark Crystal, his company developed mechanical apparatuses to make the film’s characters move.
In a recent Zoom interview with UPI, Brian Henson said subsequent Henson Company projects made use of animatronics. Henson worked for his father as a puppeteer on Labyrinth and the TV series The Storyteller before directing A Muppets Christmas Carol in 1992.
“That was the beginning of the animatronic thrust of the Jim Henson company, which continued right through Labyrinth, the Storyteller series, Witches, then on my watch, Farscape, Dinosaurs, Ninja Turtles,” Henson said. “All of those were that animatronic thrust as opposed to the Muppet style, Fraggle Rock style, simpler hand puppets.”
The Dark Crystal takes place on planet Thra, where the character Gen (Jim Henson) believes he is the last of his Gelfling kind until he meets Kira (Kathryn Mullen).
Torn between the benevolent Mystics and evil Skeksis, Gen ventures to retrieve a missing shard of the Dark Crystal to heal the powerful object before the Skeksis take over.
Brian Henson himself did not personally work on The Dark Crystal because he was in his senior year at boarding school. His sister Lisa, CEO of the Jim Henson Company, was a production assistant on the film and last year told UPI that the film paved the way for characters like Yoda in Star Wars.
Still, Brian understood the importance of The Dark Crystal for the future of the company. He said his company views animatronic characters as “one notch more believable” than hand puppets.
“The puppets are, if you cut them, you believe that felt would come out and stuffing,” he said. “But the animatronic ones, if you cut them you believe that they would bleed.”
Today, animatronics can utilize remote controlled motors and fit inside, for example, the head of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle worn by a human performer. The early animatronics were more elaborate.
“It was mostly cables coming out of the bottom of the puppet and people working each cable individually, which is actually a beautiful quality of movement but requires many more puppeteers to work each character,” Henson said.
There were still human performers inside the Mystics operating their heads. Creatures like Landstriders involved circus trained performers walking on four stilts.
“There was a safety line, because if they tipped over, it’s a long way down to the ground,” Henson said. “So there were safety wires going up into the skies to ensure that they wouldn’t fall over.”
In wide shots, Kiran Shah played Jen for actions an animatronic could not yet accomplish. In closeups, Jen could play the pipe, for which Jim Henson could control Jen’s hand using a larger hand connected by rods.
The performance of Jen showed a different side of his father, Brian said.
“He was trying to tap into his innocent, youthful, honest and genuine self, which was not what he would do generally with any Muppet characters,” he said. “For my dad, it was like a step towards more traditional acting while puppeteering.”
Today, the Jim Henson Company also incorporates digital technology into their puppetry work. Often, they will use CGI to erase the rods on puppets so they appear more organically incorporated into a scene.
Technology also allows them to erase entire puppeteers now. A puppeteer could stand next to a puppet wearing a green suit to manipulate the puppet in front of the camera, and be removed from the scene later.
“That’s the way we like to realize a full figure character rather than doing a CG version of that character,” Henson said. “It’s very difficult to get the movement quality to match between CG characters and puppeteered characters.”
Henson still produces the live theater show Puppet Up! – Uncensored, which completed a run in Los Angeles in July. The improv comedy show lets the audience see how Henson puppeteers manipulate characters below a camera frame.
The show is also a teaching tool for The Jim Henson Company, Henson said.
“It’s the hardest and scariest type of performance for the puppeteers,” he said. “We find that if we train them up in Puppet Up and improv comedy and character development, it just gives them enormous dexterity as creative performers to be able to generate new characters on the fly.”
In the show, the puppeteers create comedy scenes based on suggestions from the audience. Since it is a show for adults, there is swearing, though they refuse any suggestions that are gratuitously sexual or obscene.
They also avoid repetitive suggestions.
“As performers, we don’t want to do a suggestion that we might have gotten the night before or two nights before, because we might start repeating ourselves,” Henson said. “Then it’s not improvising anymore. We’re kind of purists that way.”
With The Dark Crystal back on the big screen, Henson encourages viewers to appreciate the imperfections of the burgeoning artform. He feels you can see his father and the other artists at work in the frames of the film.
“It’s not a perfect illusion,” Henson said. “So you recognize that those puppets were hand-built by artists, and you recognize that the sets were hand-built by artists. It’s very inspiring to creative people to go and see Dark Crystal in the theater, where you can really appreciate all of the amazing details that are in that movie. That’s hard to appreciate on a small screen.”
