Puppet Animation Films and Gesture Aesthetics

Introduction

The main aim of this article is to examine the aesthetics of gesture in puppet animation. Specifically, we have chosen three short animation films – Jiri Trnka’s The Hand (Czech Republic, 1965), Kihachiro Kawamoto’s The Demon (Japan, 1972) and Suzie Templeton’s Dog (UK, 2002) – as examples for the ways we can understand gesture and meanings. The rationale of our choice for these case studies – other than the brilliant shorts that they are – is mainly for the rich, subdued and simplistic gestures found in the puppets’ movements. Furthermore, the shorts selected are from different countries and eras to allow a wider context in observing the way gestures are manifested in puppets’ aesthetics. These animations exhibit a rich tapestry of diverse cultural production – clothes, architectural setting, social contexts – that foreground the puppet animations. We strongly believe that there is a kind of totemic power in statues and dolls that just cannot be replicated in 3D modeling, 2D drawings or computer-generated imagery (CGI). Kenneth Gross (2011: 22) articulates the mysteriousness of the puppets that ‘channel the presence of demonic spirits, or act as a vehicle to contain energies at once creative and destructive’. Frank Proschan writes how by performing through puppets we admit to our basic ‘impulse to create objects to act in our stead’ (cited in Francis, 2012: 6). A still 3D model rendered by Autodesk Softimage program is just a mere static image. On the other hand, a sitting, unmoving puppet offers a possible chance that it can move, and be alive on screen. After all, real puppets are rich in textures, and they give viewers a sense of roughness (as if we are able to touch them, though we don’t) that cannot be fully illuminated in CGI. To quote Jiří Trnka (1912–1969):

Puppet films are truly unlimited in their possibilities: they can express themselves with the greatest force precisely when the realistic expression of the cinematographic image often faces the insurmountable obstacles. The greatest successes of the puppet film have been, on the one hand, satires, on the other, poignantly lyrical subjects and also where the theme has to be expressed through piercing pathos. (cited in Sadoul, 1972: 254–255)

The category of puppet animation we are working with utilizes puppets or marionettes as the main characters of the story. In conventional puppet animation, these puppets are moved by the animator frame-by-frame, and each movement is captured by a camera. This frame-by-frame film, when projected on the screen, elicits in the viewers an illusion of movement for the puppet. The method for this design is generally known as stop-motion filming. Usually, the puppets employed are not that big (no more than 30 cm) and are made to be easily manipulable. The puppets are usually made from different body parts, with ball and socket armatures as their main skeletal frames. For example, in Peter and the Wolf (2006), Suzie Templeton used fake fur, llama wool for hair, silicone for skin, and people’s clothing for her puppets. Knowing how important the eyes are in conveying life-like emotions, Templeton states, ‘The eyes in both Dog and Peter and the Wolf are ordinary painted plastic beads. I use glycerine to make the eye surface wet and sometimes animate the glycerine itself’ (cited in Allan, 2013). For the design of the character Otesánek (2000), Jan Švankmajer used a tree stump and damaged it in such a way that it ‘has bent little legs, a slightly askew right shoulder, a distinctive gob and a wee willy. Lots of little fingers and toes’ (Švankmajer, 2002). One of the most uncanny scenes in Otesánek arrives when the-natural-yet-grotesque-looking tree stump sucks his ‘mother’s’ breast – a bizarre coupling of wood and human. There are simply no limits of technique when it comes to designing puppets.

There are many examples of puppet aesthetics that can teach us how to understand gesture and our cultures of perception. In experiencing puppet animation, we are actually rejoicing in our mortality and our personal gestures. The puppet’s movement is a creative energy that animates both its own representation and our perception. A puppet brings a certain vigor in its appearance, the kind Suzanne Buchan (2013: 143–171) describes as a ‘vitalist machine’, ¹ a fabricated object which vibrates with dynamic energies. With its artificial joints, attachable limbs, and figurative body, it is a clearing ² where possible movement is called forth. Although the puppets’ gesticulations are limited in range and flow (they are, after all lifeless forms made ‘alive’ through animated techniques), it is their restriction that engenders us to experience this smallest gesture and be enthralled by how it can still speak volumes in the context of the filmmaker’s aesthetics, narrative and setting.

We begin with some definitions of concepts and then descriptions of the animation films selected. We will then extract elements of gesture found in the three films and analyze their aesthetic merits, discussing proposed categories of gesture and, in the process, deliberating on the essence of puppet animation. The gesture itself is a sign, a cultural phenomenon – a semiotic – but our reflection upon the sign evokes what Robert Sokolowski (2000: 185) says is phenomenological reflection: ‘we turn our focus toward these disclosures themselves, toward the evidences that we have accomplished, and we think about what it is to be datives of manifestation and what it is for beings to be manifest.’ Phenomenology seeks the ‘meaning which is perhaps hidden by the entity’s mode of appearing’ (Moran, 2000: 229). To reveal the essence of a puppet is to uncover the façades the puppet wears and the way it moves its body. The short animations we are discussing are rich with artistic sensibilities, and we are not able to cover the whole spectrum of the gestures we found. We concentrate on selected examples of gesture – with an emphasis on subtlety – and then provide interpretive readings of the gestures exhibited. We conclude by formulating our findings and grouping them under a theoretical category of gestures.

Gesture: Some definitions and limitations

What do we mean by gesture? In everyday life, we perform gesture just as much as we see other people’s gestures being executed. Even animals and objects portray their own unique sense of gesture. In human sciences, gesture is the manner in which our body moves, without spoken words, in such a way that the gestures communicate meaning to the receiver. A handshake is a gesture. A finger pointing to the sky, a face looking down and a squinting eye are also gestures. Even the way our clothes move can be determined in a contextual narrative to form a symbolic gesture. Gesture can be seen as a performance of human understanding, and is what Hobart and Kapferer (2005: 1) describe as a ‘process that continually forms itself before reflection, engaging those embraced in its dynamic field to its constructive and experientially constitutive force’. In the performance of gesture we can see the culture of its producer. According to Barakat (1969: 110):

… gesture is a means of non-verbal communication which has meaning within only a specified cultural context, involving one or more bodily parts of one or more persons, and has been passed on by custom, tradition, practice (imitation), and may or may not be accompanied by verbalization, and is a substitute for speech the meaning of which has been previously agreed upon.

Hirsch (1994: 475) defines gestures as semiotic phenomena, characterizable as ‘non-conventional, non-vocal, non-verbal, non-alter contact communicative behavior produced by movements and/or configurations of the upper extremities of the body – i.e. fingers, hands, arms, shoulders, and head’.

These two definitions suggest that gesture appears in such a way that the human voice is silenced, and that gesture is expressed non-verbally through kinesis and bodily motion. A person who raises a hand and waves it up in the air communicates bodily information which can yield different meanings to the receptor of this performance. In this way, gesture too is a language, the kind that is engraved as kinetic energy. This idea can be seen in the words of Carrie Noland (2009: 2):

Gestures are a type of inscription, a parsing of the body into signifying or operational units; they can thereby be seen to reveal submission of a shared human anatomy to a set of bodily practices specific to one culture. At the same time, gestures clearly belong to the domain of movement; they provide kinesthetic sensations that remain in excess of what the gestures themselves might signify or accomplish within that culture.

In understanding gesture as aesthetics, we must recognize that the awareness of the gesture resides in our perception. This is especially true since this article discusses cinematic events that privilege sight (and hearing) more than other sensory outputs. The French director Robert Bresson expresses it best: ‘To set up a film is to bind persons to each other and to objects by looks’ (Bresson, 1977: 6). In the realm of perception, bodily gesture moves from its appearance as a performance to our consciousness as a living, meaningful essence. Edmund Husserl, founder of German phenomenology, writes:

In perception, for example, a thing stands before us as a matter of course. It is there, in the midst of other things, both living and lifeless, animate and inanimate. That is, it stands before us in the midst of a world, part of which is perceived as particular things are perceived, part of which is given in connection with memory – from whence it spreads out into the indeterminate and the unknown. (Husserl, 1999[1907]: 15)

A perceived thing stands and spreads, moving in and out of our perception. The thing is alive in Husserl’s thinking since it gestures forth to our senses just as our senses also survey and cover its form. Gesture, determined through a culture and made to appear by a subject, is a phenomenon that is encountered and experienced. Being human, we execute gesture just as easily as we breathe; it is our automatic bodily response to things we face every day. As long as there is another person who can see and understand our body movement, the culture of gesture is there for us to live in. However, generating the culture of gesture is one thing, reproducing the gesture again in the form of puppets for animation film is another. It takes great skill for an animator to replicate the movement of real life. He or she has to have an imaginative mind, a keen observation of human movement and be able to understand the technicalities of moving an object frame-by-frame in increments of miniscule duration so as not to disrupt the flow of illusion of movement that the spectator finally sees on the screen.

Figure 1 is improvised from the process of hermeneutic circle (Gadamer, 2000: 265–270; Heidegger, 1962: 192–195) and serves as a simple diagram demonstrating how we understand and experience gesture, which appears as circular and repetitive.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Gesture and its spiral of conception. © 2015 Fauzi Naeim and Nurul Lina.

Our understanding of puppet gesture is formed only when we know the entirety of the narrative that is exhibited to us, and yet our understanding of the overall gesture in an animation narrative can only be gained when we are fully aware of the accretion of the small parts of the gestures that contribute to the whole narrative. The acts of encountering, interpreting, understanding and reflecting are circular in nature and recur repetitively. The circular nature of hermeneutics is our point of aesthetics where we dwell without knowing it, but a point where we arrive nonetheless in experiencing the world. It is only by interpreting gesture that we can hope to understand its significance, as it contributes to the parts that make it whole. As the process of gesture moves to the next sequence of the film, our memories of previous gestures start to come together – to correspond – to a fuller understanding of its whole pattern, making the narrative that comes with the gesture more effective (or weaker) accordingly. This is where we reflect on our impression: the signs we experience are then compared with other signs we have experienced previously that reside in our memory. In the hands of a competent director and animator, a puppet’s gesture not only moves within the frame but comes to stir up our emotions as its significance touches our souls. Gesture speaks aesthetically to us when we are attuned to its communication, and becomes embedded in our memory and our own bodily gesticulation.

The gesture we want to examine in our article calls for a subtler kind, the one that somehow gets lost in the plethora of activities that are transmitted to us by the animation films we will discuss. It is the quiet ones that we seek: the types that speak volumes of life-like figuration and simultaneously intensify the real-ness of the puppets’ world.

Jiří Trnka’s The Hand: Oppression and resistance

The Hand (Ruka) is an 18-minute film directed and animated by Czech animator Jiří Trnka in 1965. Trnka’s previous films – The Devil’s Mill (1949), The Emperor’s Nightingale (1949) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1959) – are also considered classics in animation history, but it is The Hand that defines Trnka as a master animator in his own right. It remains one of the most celebrated short animations amongst film critics and animation connoisseurs: in 2010, it occupied third place among the 50 most outstanding films created in the half century of the existence of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA). ³

The Hand is the story of a sculptor who is happy producing flower pots until one day when he is visited by a huge hand. This hand (depicted as a human hand in white gloves, in contrast with the puppet-like appearance of the sculptor) desires a monument of and for itself, and wants the artist to use his artistic skill to complete this project. The sculptor refuses as he prefers to work modestly on his pots. This is where the gloved hand comes to haunt the sculptor and overwhelms his aspirations by invading his home with promises of wealth, status and power. The gloved hand even disguises itself in laced stockings (symbolizing a woman) to cajole the hero into bending to its will: finally, the sculptor succumbs to the hand. As he works for the hand, he soon finds himself subject to the hand’s will with no real freedom. His working environment is inside a cage. After pushing down the monument he has sculpted, he manages to escape from the cage and seals himself up inside his house. The giant hand refuses to accept this act of rebellion and pursues him to his home. As irony would have it, while the sculptor is busy protecting himself from the hand, a flower pot falls down on his head, and he drops to the floor, dead. The giant, gloved hand finds out about his death and launches a State funeral. ⁴ There is no doubt that the intrinsic allegory of the huge hand stands for the Czechoslovak communist government, and Trnka uses this film as a critique of the State’s oppression of artistic expression. This metaphoric criticism is what defines The Hand, as how the artist can still find his voice and prevail even under the State’s domination of wills. In this film, Paul Wells (1998: 88) sees ‘a vision of inhibited process and misrepresentative outcomes; a triumph of resistance’.

We now turn to gesture in this film. In the tradition of Czech puppet theatre, Trnka’s puppets have no facial movement; they remain immobile and mute. Czech animator Břetislav Pojar explains: ‘It was simply Trnka’s way of creating puppets. They had character, and yet to a certain extent a neutral expression, so that they could vary emotional states through body position or silhouettes’ (cited in Howard, 2013). Trnka’s protagonist in The Hand has a big nose, a set of wide eyes encircled by dark lines, and a smile. The decoration of his home and his passion for pots imply that he leads a simple life: he is in harmony with his art and himself. However, as time goes by, the inner peace suggested by his facial design gradually turns darker. In the scene where the sculptor is detained by the State, we see how the black lines around his eyes become more pronounced, as if the gradation of black lines is a barometer of the sculptor’s inner condition. He is spiritually exhausted, and even his smile becomes somehow timid to the point of looking ‘robotic’. This is an ironic feature; we know that the sculptor is, after all, a puppet, and artificial-looking movement is part of its gesture. Besides the lines, there is no significant change in the puppet’s facial appearance, yet we know he is depressed. Where does the ‘depression’ come from? What are the methods used to reflect his change of emotions? Firstly, to answer this question, we must understand that in reading a text, we too are embodying the text. When we see a character being oppressed by its environment, we directly identify with the character. The more human the character looks and acts in the narrative, the more intense our identification. Secondly, we must take note of the background – the puppet animation set – that is the environment for the puppet’s gesture. This background can include change of lighting, alteration of sound or decorative settings. The transformation of the background of a performing marionette – created by the animator – influences the level of intensity of the character’s psyche. For example, if a character is suddenly shrouded in darkness, with minimal lighting falling on its body, we may think that the character is in a state of heavy depression. The darkness that envelops its body becomes its tormenting world.

Let us take a look at the sequence in Figure 2. This situation emerges after the sculptor has ejected the gloved hand and its oppressive presence from his small house. Prior to this, he has kicked a television (a gift from the gloved hand), that somehow knocked over a pot that then shattered on the floor. Smiling face or not, we can assume the kicking is done out of disgust for the destruction that the hand’s gift caused. In Figure 2, the first frame shows him sitting down with his head looking left and down. Behind him is a door blocking the giant hand’s entrance. In this position, the sculptor looks at the shattered pot and sees the plant and soil scattered on the floor. He then scurries to the plant and soil and puts them into another pot. This is a quiet and beautiful sequence. The intrinsic meanings behind these images, in the context of the series of imaginings and ideas in The Hand, are simply this: he has the deepest love for the earth. The gesture of putting plants in earth is to allow them to continue growing. According to Martin Heidegger (2001[1971]: 41), earth is not only the ground where man stands, walks, sits and dwells but also a place ‘whence the arising brings back and shelters everything that arises without violation’. The soil that the sculptor nurtures to grow flowers also nurtures and shelters his heart in the face of the unknown world. Like the robot Wall-E (2008) in Pixar’s animated feature, the care of flora – which can equate to warmth and love – brings our perception closer to the possibility of a mechanical object having a human soul.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The sculptor and the flower pot. Frame grab from DVD. © Krátký Film Praha (1965).

In The Hand, the crafting of pots from the earth is the sculptor’s personal world and thus his personal well-being. It is the world that he defends against the mechanistic tyranny of the hand. The gestures shown in Figure 2 communicate gently, but with a modest power of humane voicelessness. The folding of his hands down on the soil is his sphere of resistance; the gesture itself is quiet and economic. What means are left for him to fight with? He doesn’t have the skill of a warrior or the technical know-how of building weapons. He only knows how to make pots. What is left in his being is his ‘willing-to-art’. Is it enough to counter the State power of the gloved hand? According to Nietzsche (1968[1910]: 453), ‘art is more worth than truth.’ In crafting things, art empowers the soul to confront problems that challenge us or to make sense of things that do not make sense. Art uncovers the essence of things around us, making the things appear different from the way they are. Nietzsche, with his extraordinary acumen for existentialist thinking, sees that it is only in art that one can gain power over the decadent and over depression. This is why he argues: ‘Art as the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life, as that which is anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, antinihilist par excellence’ (p. 452). Trnka’s puppet, in crafting pots so that seeds and flowers can bloom within their soil, arms and shields his body in the face of danger with the only gesture he knows: making art.

The rich symbolism that permeates Trnka’s masterpiece can offer a multitude of impressions in different viewings. One can understand The Hand as a dark allegory of an authoritative state which oppresses the common man. This common man – embodied as the puppet sculptor – has two choices: to succumb or to resist. The dilemma in The Hand resembles real life in Czechoslovakia at the time: there is simply no escape from the all-powerful State’s hegemony to control and dominate its citizens according to its will. This is also why the puppet is an excellent choice for artists to dramatize their artistic plight against the system, such as in Trnka’s fellow countrymen: Jan Švankmajer’s Punch and Judy, or The Coffin Factory (Rakvičkárna, 1966), Jiří Barta’s The Pied Piper (Krysař, 1986) and Aurel Klimt’s The Fall (Pád, 1999). Paul Wells (1998: 64) suggests: ‘The puppet can carry metaphoric and symbolic meaning, universalising its apparently human credentials, whilst disguising the personal and political agendas of the artist controlling it’ (emphasis in original). The puppet both informs and conceals the ideologue of its maker. To continue further with our appreciation of puppet gesture, we now turn to The Demon, and explore its link to myth.

Kihachirō Kawamoto’s The Demon: Theatre inside theatre

Kihachirō Kawamoto (1925–2010) is Japan’s most renowned puppet-animation director. Influenced by Japanese Bunraku (traditional puppet theatre), Noh dance theatre, and Czech puppetry, he has created fascinating animation films with narratives based on Japanese myth and folklore. The Demon (Oni), made in 1972, offers stylized Japanese theatre in a form of stop-motion animation.

The narrative of The Demon is simple. It tells the story of two siblings and their old mother. One day, the two brothers head for the woods to hunt (see Figure 3), leaving behind their old mother who is sick in bed. In the woods, they find out that their steps are being trailed by an unknown demon. The brothers manage to defeat the demon by cutting off its arm. Upon returning (along with the demon’s limb) from the woods, the brothers are shaken horribly to learn that their mother is suddenly very ill, and she has mysteriously lost one of her arms. The brothers discover that their mother is in fact the demon they have fought back in the woods! Since her identity is now revealed, she turns into a demonic figure and runs away with her prized limb. Like most Bunraku productions in which Kawamoto emulates in his stop-motion filmmaking, The Demon tells a story of despair. With its thematic concern for tradition and familial guilt, The Demon shows how humans who grow without light in their souls will gradually lose their sense of humanity. As for the mother, she has never known happiness even in her childhood. She was raised without love from her parents, her husband or even society, and lived in poverty with her wretched life filled with neglect and illness. Out of this despairing condition, darkness grows and eats away her soul, giving birth to an inhuman demon.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

The sons walk through the jungle. Frame grab from DVD. © Kimstim, Inc.

Like his teacher Trnka, Kawamoto’s puppets have no facial movement. Using only minimal backdrops in the sets, the faces maintain strict obedience to Czech tradition. Their impassivity makes each gesture of the bodies more emphasized and apparent. The more the characters remain mute, the richer their bodily movements. In Japanese theatre, the stage remains empty. In its emptiness, it demands our utmost concentration. Since there is hardly any backdrop, any kinetic movement can create distinctive reverberation throughout its staging. A gesture, no matter how slight, ‘can cause mighty things to appear out of a strange stillness’ (Heidegger, 1971: 18).

One of the most interesting features of the overall design in Kawamoto’s film is its minimalist background. This is not so surprising if we know that the background takes its cue from the Japanese theatrical arts such as Bunraku or Noh. The minimalism even extends to the choreography of the puppets, and this contributes to their rigid postures and walking. Hewes (1955: 241) writes that ‘postures are not only culturally determined, but will exhibit the kinds of geographic distribution we have come to expect from other features of cultural behavior.’ From The Demon’s costumes, we know that the story takes place in the Japanese medieval period. The postures and the walking movements of the two sons as they go into the woods are very extravagant (see Figure 3) and exaggerated: we see their hands and knees raised uniformly, in tandem with each other. These gestures, which are influenced by Japanese theatre, can infer the intensity of their mission as the walking has the feel of a purposeful stride. As the story takes place in the dead of night, the darkness lends their movements and the story a sense of mystery and dread. The background music of samisen ⁵ adds a creepy ambience to the short film, suggesting that an unknown horror is waiting just around the corner.

In Figure 4, we see the mother lying injured as both her sons tend her with astonishment, regret and care. Astonishment, since they have found out that it was their mother who has hunted them all along. Regret, for cutting off their mother’s hand. These two conflicting emotions are brought forth in the gesture of care. We cannot see expressions of regret in their white, cold masks but regret and care are observed in the puppets’ gestures and postures. Soon, the mother will crawl to her detached arm hand and eat her hand. Soon, she will transform into the demon that she was. But for now, she momentarily finds peace in the embrace of her son’s body. In the performance of ‘embracing’, bodies come closer and generate heat, which is how embrace insinuates intimacy. Smith (2006: 3) has an interesting phenomenological comment about embrace:

No idle movement, the timely embrace transcends simple motion to express an emotional simplicity. It arrests the chatter of words and lays out a truth to enduring relationships. There is realization, in the moment, of what was latent all along. An embrace is the gesture that sets upon time, summoning many pasts, receiving possible futures, capturing the intensity and poignancy of this moment, here and now. The joys of anticipation and realization merge.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

The tragic death of the mother in Demon (Oni, 1972). Frame grab from DVD. © Kimstim, Inc.

If anything, the image in Figure 4 epitomizes the intensity and poignancy of a moment, as ‘anticipation and realization merge’. If gesture summons many pasts, then the pasts that are summoned in The Demon are what liberates the mother to be what she is – a demon. To eat her body is to be whole. To be able to leave her sons (and thus her life) is to be free from societal restrictions and able to pursue the promise of the unknown.

In experiencing The Demon’s puppets’ gestures, we are offered several levels of identification. First, the connection between the puppets’ gestures with our own human gestures since watching a puppet move ignites in us an empathy with our own bodily movement. Secondly, the puppets’ set of gestures makes manifest its relation to its own cinematic world. The puppet exists and thrives in its setting. The relation of the puppets with their surroundings instinctively makes us aware too, of our relation to our own world. It is as if by experiencing the protruding arm of a puppet, we are gauging the space of where the arm comes to rest. Thirdly, the act of interpreting the puppets’ movement through Japanese aesthetics (Bunraku, Noh or Kabuki) is an act of cultural identification. If we know the myth the film is based on, watching it will be even more interesting since we can take note of the distinctive signs and compare them with the literary inscriptions that already exist in our memory. In Kawamoto’s animated puppetry, it is this third clarification – the guise of cultural signification – that makes watching his films an even more intriguing experience. The same can be said, too, of Trnka’s play of allegory and symbolic pattern. A better understanding of Czech government or the general knowledge of fascist States worldwide enrich our appreciation of The Hand’s rich symbolisms at work.

Suzie Templeton’s Dog: The wound for words

Suzie Templeton’s Dog (2001) is another astute short animation film. It has garnered much critical acclaim, including BAFTA Awards, British Animation Awards and the Grand Prize in the Ottawa International Animation Festival among others. Dog is the story of a young boy’s sadness after his mother’s enigmatic death. His companion is a dog who is afflicted with a mysterious sickness. One night, he sees his father kill the dog. From that time onwards, he understands that the way his dog was killed is just the same way as his mother was killed by his father. He understands, then, the act of merciful death for the ones he loves.

Unlike Kawamoto’s The Demon with its stylized setting, Dog’s location and design follow a style of realism. Here, in contrast to The Hand or The Demon, the puppets are portrayed and modeled to be capable of speaking, with mouths and lips, but retain the basic feature of unchanging facial expression. The father’s facial design consists of sad eyes, heavy eyebrows, and a deep set of lines in his cheeks (Figure 5) that give a sense of raw intensity concealing deep emotional scars. The same design concept is found in his son Danny’s face; we can see a texture of blemish below his eyes, with low eyebrows knitted together to infer unhappiness and emotional injury. The eyes are remarkably life-like and gaze out in childlike innocence.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

The son and the father. Frame grab from Dog (DVD), Suzie Templeton, 2001. © Royal College of Art.

Let us consider the series of four frames from Dog in Figure 6. The boy Danny sees something is wrong with his dog. He then cries out for his Dad. The second frame shows us the setting – a backyard of a house. In the third frame, we see the father’s hand gripping the door frame. The fourth shows the father’s expression – his permanent puppet look of angst becomes amplified in our gaze. We would like to examine the hand gripping the doorway. Why would the director design this small scene? It is in order for us to see the father’s way of controlling his anxiety. The hand indicates restraint and self-control, and there is something about the situation of the dog dying that gives us a clue about the film’s conclusion. In fact, at the end of the film, we come to know that the terrible situation was actually anticipated by the father; he was prepared to let the dog die. The hand that clutches the door frame is his way of controlling his emotion. By gripping hard, he can support himself and stand still, to stop him from further action and further despairing consequences.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 6.

Scene in the backyard (left to right). Frame grab from Dog (DVD), Suzie Templeton, 2001. © Royal College of Art.

As events are revealed in the final scene (Figure 7), an atmosphere of alienation develops. The way the audience is treated to the unmasking of the mother’s mysterious death is done in a most subtle fashion. Danny is busy combing his hair in front of a mirror, with his back to the father, whose body is facing the window. The setting is a kitchen, early in the morning. As the boy brushes his hair – with the kind of movement that feels (ironically!) ‘mechanical’, as if his heart is somewhere else rather than in this moment – we observe their quiet confrontation with the dialogue below:

Father: It was very peaceful.

Danny: [turns to face his father]

Father: He didn’t suffer …

Danny: Like Mom.

Father: [nods, gently]

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 7.

Final scene in the kitchen (left to right). Dog (DVD), Suzie Templeton, 2001. © Royal College of Art.

In the second frame in Figure 7, we observe their relative postures; both have their backs to each other. At the same time, both are facing mirrored surfaces. Indeed, there is a certain property in the glass, in the mirror, that reflects not just our physicality but our soul too. Hints of the past night’s activity are given in the third frame of Figure 7: bleach, detergent. We can infer this is what the father used to clean up the dog’s carcass, the dog he killed the previous night. ‘It was very peaceful’, says the father, referring to the way the dog died. He doesn’t know, of course, that his son has seen him murder the dog. The father continues with his well-meant lie: ‘He didn’t suffer.’ Danny knows the truth, and he interjects: ‘Like Mom.’ Not a question, but more like a probing statement. When his father nods, Danny knows that his mother met her death violently too, in the same way the dog died, at the hand of his father.

There is disparaging gravity in the meaning of the figures’ dialogue, but what interests us most here are the gestures they display while speaking to each other. The boy is combing his hair. The father is cleaning the kitchen. Why? Is their way of communicating an escape from a direct argument? Perhaps the director moves the puppets – which have grown more alive in every second of the short animation – in such a way that the gestures help mask their conflicting emotions. Napier (cited in McNeill, 1992: 11) writes: ‘If language was given to men to conceal their thoughts, the gesture’s purpose was to disclose them.’ Combing hair and cleaning the table are elements of the everyday. It is in this banal everyday-ness – like humans – that the puppets are able to continue with their life together. The body is a conduit that spreads itself prosthetically through gesture. Since the body contains the soul (and vice versa), the prosthetic-like limbs of these remarkable puppets become the premise for the writings of its world.

The bodily gesture writes, and it writes the world. In one scene of Templeton’s film, we see spots spattered across the wall beside the boy’s bed. As time goes by, we get to know that the spots actually signify his mother’s blood. This is of course our interpretation, but in interpreting the images, we work with the overarching narrative and bodily gestures to make our critical observations. Not only are the clues pointing to the blood as his mother’s but we can also surmise that the blood is spattered as we see it on the wall because his father killed his mother. Why did he murder his wife? So as to free her from a wretched, slow death. The dog’s miserable condition, with its unknown disease, is an analogue to the (possible) symptoms of the boy’s mother. When we see the way the dog carries itself in the film, its slow movements and gestures, we can assume that it is in severe pain and needs attention because of its condition. Furthermore, in the dog’s gestures, the spectre of death comes to the fore. We infer the mother’s murder was almost identical to the way the dog was killed. When the dog dies at the hand of the father, the boy instinctively knows the how of his mother’s death. In the close-up of his face, we see his eyes glimmer with the possibility of understanding. Thus, we too, the immobile audience, know. This is why in understanding gestures as articulated in film, we achieve a fuller understanding only when the film is finished. The understanding of gesture – prior to and after a shot – moves in a dialectical turn until it accumulates to form a coherent whole.

Possible categories of gesture in puppet animations

In the analyses of gesture definitions offered above, readers must consider that they are made particularly in terms of the relations between humans and gesture. In distinguishing gesture for puppets – especially in puppet animation – we run the risk of delimiting the movement of their puppet-ness. In giving form to puppet’s ‘life-ness’, we are at the same time imbuing a special kind of consciousness to the puppets, akin to a human being, even though we know that their movements are artificial, copied from human life by the animator. ‘The puppet’s body’, Cappelletto (2011: 332) says, ‘whether made of wood or of cloth, is the setting of the expression of kinesthetic experience of oneself as a specific form of existential experience.’ However, even as we know of their artificiality, in experiencing puppets’ kinestheticism, we still find ourselves enthralled. The diegesis and the phenomena that are filmic sweep us off our feet to the point of make believe. The design, construction and movements of animated puppets might be imitative of humans, but our emotions in encountering their gestures are real experiences. Puppets’ gestures are what we define as the movement of enlivened puppets: artificial objects that are given life through their motion, their single frame recording on film, and by our perceptions. The enlivened puppets transcend their shell of uncanniness and incite our feelings through our identification with their movements and ours. They communicate to us messages and tidings of their animated world and narratives. Their limited movements – measuring unseen pressure and texture, as if feeling their weight in an illusory gravity – offer a stark contrast to the smooth gestures of ordinary human beings in such a way that we perpetually wonder about the possibilities of objects twisted in the palpability of soul. The more tragic the story, the more ‘life’ we hammer down into the puppets. No wonder these puppets are having a hard time walking smoothly; our perception – a perception which is always ready to believe in a form of life for any object – gives weight to their being. We have developed five categories of possible gestural production based on our case studies (see Figure 8). These categories of gesture can also be found in non-narrative experimental stop-motion such as Jan Švankmajer’s A Game with Stones (Hra s kameny, 1965) or Piotr Kamler’s One Ephemeral Mission (Ulotna Misja, 1993). We work with two main perspectives in puppet animation films: the spectator’s perspective and that of the animator. Both are grounded in ‘cultural conditioning’, the kind of enculturation whereby we learn and understand values which eventually shape our own in the process. The five categories of gesture give credit to the creators of the puppet animation since they are, after all, the first originators who create the movement that we see on the screen. There are two types of operation prior to film screening: the creator’s gesture and the technical gesture. The former implies the designer’s or animator’s bodily movement as they create and animate the puppet, the latter showcases the puppet’s body moved and manipulated slowly by the animator, frame-by-frame, and recorded using cinematographic means. In the production of the animation, both are considered meaningless gestures. They are traces that are consumed in the event that is stop-motion animation.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 8.

Categories of possible gestural production in puppet animations. © 2015 Fauzi Naeim and Nurul Lina.

In encountering gesture, we can only hope to understand its meaning if we are already part of the culture in which the signifying gesture has been used before. As we encounter gesture, our sense begins to interpret it. However, any interpretation of gesture is embedded in the context and environment where it takes place. For example, in Templeton’s Dog (Figure 6), the frame of the hand on the door is almost meaningless if it stands alone. It is in the operation of a dialectic – of the previous shot and the next shot – that we can better construe the gesture, and thus see its symbolic connection to the father’s angst. This is what we call a diegetic gesture. The enlivened puppets then grow out of their proto-dependency on their creators and begin to renew their gesture not only by living fully in the animated world they are entombed in, but also in seeking pleasure in giving life to other objects around them. In Jiří Trnka’s world, the puppet sculpts pots and a giant hand statue simply out of nothing. We call this type of gesture a world-viewed gesture: a phenomenon whereby an automaton creates another automaton.

Our final category is what we call ‘attuned gesture’. In the process of reading and understanding a puppet animation film, a puppet’s movement becomes attuned to our being. In attunement dwells the site of conflict vs harmony, the site in which a puppet’s movement comes to rest within our bodily understanding. A display of ‘embrace’ in Kawamoto’s The Demon (Figure 4) evokes the viewer’s in-built bodily system, of his or her past experience in holding something or someone. Our cultural understandings of ‘gesture archetypes’ such as ‘embracing = caring’ enrich, and become enriched by, the process. This is how our empathy is built up and cultivated in the surrounding of signs that are everywhere. In attunement, our emotions, having grasped the artistry of the film, come to rest on the surfaces of the puppets themselves and live in their movements.

In the animations we have discussed, the puppets’ gestures speak to us slowly, deliberately. The quiet gesture they exhibit gives way to what is thoughtful. Paradoxically, the more puppets stay still (after demonstrating their ability to move), the more they are alive in our experience. It is as if in being able to move, they can also opt to sit still, and in being still, their bodies gaze out their movement by being perfectly inert. Only a puppet can combine this wonderful paradox of being-still and being-moving in a unifying manner. The animator’s hands become nothing more than human tools lent to the puppet’s becoming. Clearly it must be understood that in our analysis of gestures found in the puppet animations discussed, the gestures themselves are not ‘natural’; they are not ‘spontaneous and created through the whim of the individual’ (Kendon, 2004: 3) but are instead mechanically limited yet uncannily lifelike in their restraints. Under the guise of electronic devices and rectangular framing, the puppets move according to premeditated timing with economical precision. Despite their limitation as mechanical objects, rich meanings are still communicated to viewers thanks to the unseen puppeteers, the puppets’ attire, background design, lighting and camera placements. It is as if the puppets have left out unnecessary movement in the communicating of gesture, unlike humans who are loaded with excesses of gesture. We move since we are unable not to move. The puppets, on the other hand, move since their inert forms covet gesture. They move so that they can escape death.