Puppets Are Back, says Huffington Post

Are puppets making a come-back? The Huffington Post is running an article on the reappearance of puppetry in popular culture, citing the new Muppets movie, Broadway shows like War Horse and Hand to God, and—because it’s Huffpo—the recent Fox News blithering over Communist Muppets.

In the midst of all this, they threw in a few brief words from War Horse‘s puppetry associate, Matt Acheson [Hey, I've met that guy!], who touched on a point central to our study. As he puts it:

as human beings, we respond to seeing this “tactile and visceral” object, so intricately crafted, yet you still “somehow feel this extremely emotional experience.”

[...]

Acheson said a puppet scratching its face simply holds more weight than a human scratching its face. It’s more interesting to watch, he said, though he can’t fully explain why.

I’d like to think about “why”. Even in our own work in class, everyone sat riveted by the simple movements of our paper puppets. Would the reaction have been the same if I had said to a member of class: “walk across the room, stop for some reason halfway across, and then continue.”? What is it about the use of a puppet that makes such a straightforward scene so compelling for the audience?

via Puppets Are Back: The Reemerging Popularity And Relevance Of Inanimate Objects. Found, as usual, throughMary Robinette Kowal‘s Google+ stream.