Last night a group of us went to see the midnight showing of the Dark Crystal. This is the first time I’ve seen it projected since its original appearance in 1982. What amazed me was how well the puppetry stands up. The other special effects? Not so much. I’m not sure if I should chalk that up to puppetry having a longer history than compositing and CGI or if it’s because they are objects that truly exist and so have an inherent consistency with the way they interact with the physical world.

When I was an intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts, they had one of the mystics on display in the museum. This static puppet still seemed to have a life. If you stood in the room with it, you’d swear that it was breathing, perhaps simply meditating. I wasn’t alone in my reaction to it.

With stage puppetry, part of the magic comes because audiences have to actively invest their willing suspension of disbelief. More so than with a human actor, an audience member has to participate in the act of believing a puppet is alive. Which is one of the reasons that when puppets die onstage, they die so thoroughly. The audience had put part of themselves into the character. When an actor dies, you know that they are just pretending. A puppet is dead and returned to its inanimate state.

I think there’s some of that when watching puppets on film too. Certainly, I find the puppet Yoda more compelling than the CGI Yoda. It’s a curious thing.

The film itself… I’d love to see Frank Oz do a director’s cut, where they return to the original dialogue. In the original version, the Skeksis spoke in a constructed language, with subtitles. Here’s what that sounds like. No subtitles, sorry.