"The Dark Crystal" and "Thief and the Cobbler": Where the Outer Limits Lie

The Dark Crystal, created by Jim Henson productions in 1982, didn’t sweep the box office or the Oscars and won’t impress most, yet it remained the only movie to exclusively focus on puppetry until two and a half decades later. That's right, every character, creature, villain, hero, and bystander is a puppet. The story heavily borrows from previous fantasy cliches and the characters lack originality compared to other similar movies, but it remains essential watching for one reason--it proves that even puppetry has its limits. The creatures and characters stretch the techniques and forms of puppetry to and sometimes past the outer realms of uncanny valley and believable motion. When they take puppets that shouldn’t work and make them run or fall you believe in a world beyond our own, that the shambling mounds of plastic, fabric, and rods have breath, thought, and secrets.

The puppeteers give life to the characters and world in The Dark Crystal, but the flaws of puppetry as a form appear because they shoot everything with puppets, and the main heroes have faces belonging to the uncanny valley. Richard Williams' Thief and the Cobbler (1993), otherwise known as Princess and the Cobbler (1993, Allied Filmmakers), or Arabian Knight, elicits the same feeling in me.  What was supposed to be animation director Richard Williams’ swan song turned into an ugly duckling when Miramax bought the project and kicked him to the curb in order to get a quick return. After Williams had headed the project for around 30 years, which resulted in a cobbled together movie that unfortunately came out around the same time as Aladdin and could never shake the audience unfavorably comparing the two similar stories and distinct animation styles. The project also included more dialogue or rather inner monologues to try and simply explain the original trippy transitions and silent character interactions. They even tried to include musical numbers and pop cultural references to varying degrees of success. Some of Matthew Broderick’s and Jonathan Winters’ incessant monologues help increase audience understanding and amusement, while some of their texts merely inanely repeat what the visuals already made clear.

Williams’ claim that this would change the face of animation does make the movie worth watching as he creates moving 3-D images with nothing more than paper, pencil, and cel shading. Although incomplete, these scenes show not only how much you can do with 2-D animation, they also prove, as Dark Crystal did for puppetry and the Star Wars prequels did for CGI, where the outer limits lie. Many of his attempts remain cool to look at and an invaluable teacher for when and where another technique or format could work quicker and smoother. The Recobbled Cut (versions released in 2006, 2007, and 2013), while not perfect either, provides a case study for editing power. We see what later cuts chose not to include, while explaining every bit  jumped headfirst into. It shows one person can’t always do everything alone, while also showing the problems of letting accountants and trend followers control the Hollywood cash flow. I wish there could be a happy medium that includes what works best from both cuts in each element, but alas, our privilege only allows us to glimpse in both cases what might have been.

--Rozlynd