So I watched The Dark Crystal with the 9 year old last night and it's always disappointing how weak of a movie it is. I found it only makes sense if you assume Henson just had lots of ideas for cool scenes with advanced puppets and then just loosely strung together a plot with vaguely fantasy-sounding dialog.
@ZachWeinersmith it didn't stop me from staring agog at a full, from-the-movie-set Skeksi at the Atlanta puppetry arts museum several years ago. The design was astounding and daring.
And I have fond memories of standing in front of an elevator at a SF Convention with my boyfriend and we both sing that note the Uru did to part the soldiers.
@ZachWeinersmith There are a lot of details, documented in Brian Froud's The World of the Dark Crystal, that never made it into the movie that could've helped.
At least they tried with the Netflix series to get a better story out there.
@ZachWeinersmith You may want to give the prequel series on Netflix a shot. It was canceled (of course, b/c Netflix) but it's pretty satisfying overall.
@ZachWeinersmith Originally it was meant not to have dialogue. It was all supposed to be incomprehensible doubletalk like the Podlings' pseudo-Polish language.
Like it just absolutely reeks of too many ideas, none of which are that original. If you even just had a hack fantasy author come in and spend a weekend on it, it would've been a million times better.
One thing I love about Henson is that like other great artists he kept pushing the medium more and more and more, but unfortunately when he got to the tippy top, doing serious cinematic stuff, it's like all the focus is on showing off how cool their creature shop is and the plot and characters are an afterthought.
@ZachWeinersmith Henson's best work was always as a consultant and prop manufacturer. The puppet characters in shows like Farscape worked so well because Henson's focus was on visual language and craftsmanship, leaving others to handle plot and dialogue that made you feel like they were real.
@gsuberland My unproveable theory about this sort of thing is that it's very easy to check if visuals look cool, so iterating is maybe hard but ultimately you can do it. With plotlines it is much harder to tell what's wrong and much harder to tell when it's fixed.
@ZachWeinersmith I think that's definitely true with most VFX work, static props, and sets. I'd argue that there's some crossover when it comes to puppetry, because the combination of coherent visual language, visual execution, and puppeteer choreography acts as a significant force multiplier when it comes to the expressiveness and believability of the character beyond the voice actor's line reads alone.
@ZachWeinersmith Being able to gauge what specific element of the performance isn't quite landing right seems like it'd be just as hard as doing the same thing with writing and directing for human actors, and possibly even harder if you don't have an experience consultant on-hand to provide input (e.g. if you're contracting out puppet and model work piecemeal rather than having them on-staff).
@ZachWeinersmith@gsuberland there’s a reason Pixar has a team of scriptwriters and wickedly fast storyboard artists and all the pre-viz work: nailing the story beats and timing perfectly takes so much work and effort. And they have to SELL it to each other, and then field ideas and improvements and feedback and all the stuff ‘singular iconic voices’ usually aren’t able to absorb. Oddly, even the made-by-committee movies (DC?) fail to focus that attention on the STORYTELLING.
@i_understand@gsuberland For sure. Though, shortly before he died they were working on a Disneyworld section by Henson, which I think would have been incredible.
@dlakelan Star Wars would be a better example. Then Lucas tried to CGI over a lot of the puppetry in the revisions and proved how much better Henson's work was.
@Chrishallbeck You're right in that he or his companies never directly worked for Lucas, but he did consult a lot with Lucas and Freeborn in the development of Yoda. Lucas even wanted him to be the voice, but Henson thought that would conflict with everything else he was doing, so Oz got that job via Henson's recommendation. It's Frank Oz that helped make Yoda as we know him, there was apparently some disapproval of Oz's direction at first.
The several people that worked Jabba, and probably other puppets, were part of Henson's group, but I guess not working through his company but directly with Lucas.
@ZachWeinersmith I've met people who are head over heels about The Dark Crystal, but they almost always talk about the amazing puppetry and not the story.
@gnuconsulting The puppetry is astonishingly good. Probably unrivaled, perhaps forever. But often it just creates problems. Like probably more time is spent panning across cool scenes or with needlessly showing off awesome puppets than is spent on meaningful dialog.
@dragonsidedd@gnuconsulting It's a cool character design but it's never even clear why she's there or what her motivations are. She just kind of shouts vaguely jedi-sounding stuff and for unexplained reasons has the missing crystal shard. There's a whole amazing scene with her giant prediction apparatus that never affects anything in the story!
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