SINISTER APPEAL
Robert Lloyd looks into The Dark Crystal’s bad Muppets.
PUPPETS are powerful. A sock pulled over a hand becomes a snake; a piece of wood at the end of a string learns to dance. Breathing life into the lifeless is what gods and wizards do, and there is something magical — and a little black magical — about the act, the art, of puppetry. Puppets are delightful and disturbing. We greet them with interest and with apprehension.
Netflix’s prequel to the late Jim Henson’s 1982 movie
The Dark Crystal, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance , is nearly all puppets, nearly all the time. It’s a story of light and dark, good and evil, rebels and overlords set in a galaxy far, far away on a planet called Thra. The film was meant to be frightening, and the series, which has more opportunity for tension and torture, can make Punch and Judy look like a love duet. (There is also comedy in it, which puppets do well, and a little romance, which can be odd.)
I have no idea how many years before the movie this series is supposed to take place. (Some characters are alive in both, but they are quasiimmortal beings, so that is not much to go by.) For supernatural reasons having to do with the whole ecology of the planet, a powerful crystal has cracked, creating two cosmically intertwined races: the usually agitated, mostly evil, birdlike Skeksis, and the slowmoving, peaceable Mystics, who might be described as sixlimbed giant hippie hound dogs. The Skeksis run the planet, whose unquestioning smaller creatures — the faunfairy Gelflings, the little round Podlings — they variously employ, enslave and drain of their vital essence, which they drink as a rejuvenating pickmeup.
On Sesame Street, Muppets have often been monsters of a friendly disposition: Elmo is a monster, Cookie Monster is a monster for cookies. But the Dark
Crystal monsters are also Muppets.
(They are not, legally, Muppets, with a capital M, for that brand has been locked since 2004 in Disney’s unassailable Tower of Intellectual Property.) There is a repertoire of techniques and technologies designed by
Henson and his collaborators, a physical vocabulary of head shakes, mouth gapes, hand flops, bouncy walks. And so you may see in the Skeksis a hint of Big Bird, in the lumbering Mystics the shadow of Snuffleupagus.
The story is built from the familiar fantasy tool kit: big things preying upon small things, small things fighting back against big things, mystic crystals, magic swords, dangerous journeys, palace intrigue, unlikely simple folk becoming great heroes. There is touch of The Lord of the Rings in it, some Star Wars — the subtitle Age of
Resistance would fit any number of films in that franchise — and some Avatar, though it is perhaps fairer to say there is some Dark Crystal in Avatar, the former having preceded the latter by 27 years. We get at least one specific reference to The Wizard of Oz, the mother of all quest films.
But what matters most is the worldbuilding — really building, with felt and foam and wood and wire and plaster and paint and whatever else it took to make this place and populate it.
Obviously, the world is full of young (and not so young) people who have never known life without supercharged computer animation, whose visual sense has been shaped by video games and movies made to look like video games. There are Star Wars fans for whom actionpacked 21st century Yoda is the ideal Yoda, not the original puppet played by Henson collaborator Frank Oz, a threedimensional figure acting in real space in real time. (That Oz was
Miss Piggy ought to be basic cultural knowledge.) I do not think it is merely a sign of age that I find such a preference sad.
Digital effects are, of course, the work of human imagination and labour, and not without artistic interest.
But they are also commonplace and, by nature, lifeless. Indeed, the whole point of modern special effects is to erase any trace of the human hand, in the name of perfect, impossible, antiseptic naturalism. For all their psychedelic clarity, I’ve never seen any CG creation as mindbending or breathtaking as that first sight of Kermit the Frog riding a bike in The Muppet Movie.
There are some computergenerated backgrounds in
Age of Resistance and other bits of digital housekeeping. Greenscreen effects were used to remove puppeteers, but there is no attempt to disguise the fabricated nature of the figures and the sets they inhabit. Light and texture are captured, not recreated. You can sense the air around the characters. That you may be subtly conscious of the human performers behind, below and inside them will not distract from the story, but it does enrich the experience: people made this; we are not entirely hopeless. — TNS
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance is available to
stream via Netflix.