When I first started making animal hand puppets, I had this great vision of making them for people and children. I thought I would be able to create a family of puppets that would interact with one another and help each other solve problems. Instead, I discovered that puppets are just a tool and they are not meant to solve any problems.
I think this is the most important part of this article, so let me break it down. I don’t think animals have an “inner child” or a “inner intelligence”. The idea being that a puppeteer creates a character that can perform certain actions and be acted upon by other puppeteers. So an animal puppet might be a fish, a bird, or a dog. These puppeteers are all just tools that are being used to perform an action.
This is one of those things that would be nice to have and the use of puppets would be fantastic, but it doesn’t really have a place in the world that I can see. Puppets are a tool, not a purpose and that is the way it should be.
I just read an article on the Huffington Post that goes into some detail about the use of animal puppets. It’s not something I would be into, but it’s a nice read. It’s a bit depressing that the use of animals in movies and television has become so ubiquitous, but I’m sure lots of people would rather watch this than a “normal” movie, movie trailer, or TV episode.
I would have to agree with you. It used to be that puppets were used as props in movies and TV. Then they became a part of the plot in the movies and TV shows. But puppets are a tool. You can use a puppet for a purpose in your life and not be restricted to a single use.
The fact is that most people tend to have an opinion on what they like to watch based on what they see on television and movies. You can’t really do anything about this, but if you want to watch something, you have to turn your antenna up and tune in. You don’t have to like it, but you have to tune in for it.
People complain about the lack of variety in their favorite shows. They complain about how boring some of their favorite shows are. But if you actually watched them, you would realize that most of them are boring because they are so incredibly predictable. The basic plot is the same every episode. Some of the characters are the same. But none of the major story lines are different. You just watch the same plot.
That was the problem when the idea of ‘animal puppets’ was born. There are thousands of great TV shows that have the same basic plot, with the same characters playing the same roles. But there are only a handful that have characters that are completely different, and that is because they are so predictable that it makes the idea of changing them seem impossible. There are even shows that feature the same people doing so many things that they seem like random results.
There are many reasons to be excited about animal puppets. It’s easy to take the common plot and make it something that is so easy to copy and adapt than it is to create something original.
The fact that the animal puppets in Animal Kingdom are all so similar in their behavior is a good thing. A lot of the same things can be done with animal puppets, but there has to be a balance. We don’t want a series of animals doing the same thing over and over again which is why we see so many variations of these characters.