Puppet movies, puppets used in movies, and movies about puppets.

To be clear, "puppet movies" refers to movies that are made for puppets. There is yet to be a movie made for puppets, so puppets remain an un-tapped demographic. That being said, there are plenty of them IN movies, weather people know it or not.

Some movies revel in the fact that they feature puppets, with notable examples such as the Muppet movies or Team America: World Police.

The Muppet Movie, one of many movies starring Jim Henson's creations.

But most movies that feature puppets make it a goal for the audience to not realize it's a puppet! A great number of the aliens in the original "Men in Black" were puppets, as were the larger dinosaurs in the original Jurassic Park. 

The "Star Wars" series is full of puppets as well, with one of it's title characters being one! 

Jedi master Yoda in all his glory!
(In the later movies, Yoda was CG.)

In more recent movies, the use of puppets has been replaced with CG effects. CG is often used in places where a good puppet would work just as well. In the late 1990's and early 2000's CG was over-used to the tune of laughable results. Though animation is powerful, there are times where a puppet adds an effect that can't be gotten anywhere else. 

  

 One of my personal favorite movie puppets, "Brundlefly" in the 1986 "The Fly" remains impressive, even today. 

It's About Character (pun intended)

I fell in love with puppet theatre when I was a kid, and the fascination about it has never stopped entrancing me. There is something magical about the transference that occurs from puppeteer to puppet and vice versa, as the puppet character takes not only a life of it's own but starts controlling the life of the puppeteer!

As Ricky Syers, creator of Stix says in this video "I'm not really sure where Stix is going...but I am willing to go along for the ride".  This experience holds true for all of us who work in this or other forms of storytelling. We see our characters take a life of their own and have to be very careful not to intervene but simply clear the way to let them express themselves.

Like Gustave Baumann, a maker of marionettes and creator of The Puppet Wranglers said in his comment about the work of master Bill Dwiggins; "These animated pieces of wood, properly jointed, take on a life of their own, move about in ways you never dreamed of, and rewrite your script without bothering to ask permission."

William Addison Dwiggins (1880-1956) by the way, was a type designer (characters, get it?), calligrapher, typographer, illustrator and writer, one of the foremost contributors to the printing arts, but my admiration for him comes from the world he created through his Experimental Theatre, where some truly extraordinary characters came to life, in a meticulous carved environment where every element of design, wether visible to the audience or not, was made with the exacting precision of his great font designs, widely used in the book publishing industry, and carried today in digital form by Linotype.

Dwiggins is also credited with coining the term 'graphic designer' in 1922*


*Livingston, Alan and Isabella., 'Dictionary of graphic design and designers'. London: Thames and Hudson, 1992