It’s easy to identify whom to root for, and even easier whom to root against, and this clear delineation animates the narrative. In contrast are the mysterious Mystics, gentle, slow-moving, placid creatures-representing creativity and wisdom-and Aughra, the maternal embodiment of the planet, among other creatures. Through it all, they weaponize the technology of extraction to plunder the world they inhabit. ![]() They’ve enslaved the Podlings, a race of small, gentle creatures, and turned the often naïve but generally wholesome, elf-like, Gelflings, against each other to distract from their own exploitation. The frightening, dinosaur-like race of Skeksis, representing greed, ambition, and industry, colonize and rule over the mythical world of Thra, and their authority is enacted via manipulation and subjugation. In their exoticization of elements of human nature, the creatures in The Dark Crystal canon are perfect vehicles for the allegorical mode. Unconstrained as it is from the demands of realism, then, high fantasy puppetry like this is particularly well-suited to enact social and political critique. Strings, as they say, are always attached. In ways that are echoed within the story, the contemporary mode is often one of skepticism and even cynicism nothing can be taken at face value, someone or something-be it Vladimir Putin, the Clintons, Chinese hackers, the main stream media, George Soros-is believed to be dictating the narrative behind the scenes. No matter your leanings, it’s now a shared assumption that politicians (probably the ones you don’t like) and news media personalities (the ones you have differences with) are themselves puppets, be it of foreign governments, corporations, or other powerful interests. ![]() But what also makes the art of this film and series so compelling is the way a sense of puppetry pervades our contemporary political discourse. It’s a credit to the puppeteers and the puppet designers of this project that the characters of Thra range between being truly horrifying to cuddly and charming to incredibly human-like, with shifts in character often being visually portrayed. Certainly, a puppet is uniquely able to externalize aspects of character, and, by extension, ideology the way it looks and moves tells us much about the role it’s playing in the narrative. Even more so than animation, and in a manner that’s impossible with live actors, this work is able to straddle the line between the recognizable and foreign we are invited into another world, an obviously constructed one, while seeing shades of ours within it.Īnd it’s precisely the symbolic value of puppetry-the way this art form explicitly works as metaphor-that makes The Dark Crystal so haunting and effective in its moral purpose. ![]() This is in part why the prequel series stayed true to the original formula and used CGI only sparingly to augment live-action sets and puppets. “With puppets, generally, you’re working symbolically, a puppet is a symbol of whatever you want to portray,” Henson remarked in a profile for The Discovery Channel, “there’s a kind of purity to it.” So by overtly working with artifice and with objects to create a planet and world-build the puppets help us get a better look at ours. ![]() Based on characters first dreamt up by Henson and brought to life by illustrator and artist, Brian Froud, with the prequel series taken up by the Henson Company (under the direction of Louis Leterrier), an entire fantasy world is constructed, piece by piece. Key to the potency of The Dark Crystal canon is the fact that the stories are told with puppetry. And, just as it is here on earth, it’s the trees-the natural world-that carry the first signs of disaster. As relevant as ever, within its mythical world of Thra arise allegories of survival and solidarity in the face of climate catastrophe. After the hottest July on record, to watch Jim Henson’s 1982 film, The Dark Crystal, and its recently released 10-episode prequel Netflix series, Age of Resistance, is to confront that story: to confront the way that industry and the obsession with the extraction of wealth and power can bring a planet to the brink. We know this story from fiction, told as it’s been in everything this side of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and in countless other works of fantasy and sci-fi literature.
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