Madame Tutli-Putli

The eyes are the windows to the soul. And it’s incredible what an effect putting live-action eyes into stop-motion puppetry can accomplish. Madame Tutli-Putli, the breakthrough work from Clyde Henry Productions – commissioned as a result with the expertly-crafted puppetry short Higglety Piggelty Pop! – is unforgettable in aesthetic terms. A real labour of love, it involved not only the laborious process of stop-motion animation, but live-action actors then matching the puppets’ movements so that their eyes could be digitally mapped to the models. And what an effect it has! Not only do the puppets gain an uncanny, unsettlingly realistic quality, but they are able to show emotions in an unprecedented way. A stunning experiment, it is no surprise that this short was nominated for an Oscar in the same year as another astonishing show of hard work, My Love by Aleksandr Petrov, though the winner that year was the Peter and the Wolf Prokofiev animation.

The story is both simple and open-ended: a character we assume is the eponymous Madame Tutli-Putli boards a train with what seems like all the baggage of her life. The other occupants of her compartment are strange – men in the luggage rack watching a chessboard as the movements of the train make the moves for them, a little boy with an adult face reading a book with an unsettling title, and a famous tennis player who makes obscene gestures at her. In the night, the train is boarded and a strange gas fills the air. The last thing our protagonist glimpses is a corpse-like face shushing her as the tennis player’s organs are harvested.

What follows is entirely open to interpretation – did she simply wake to an empty train? Did she die and run to the afterlife? Is the whole thing symbolic of leaving behind a sad life to embrace an exciting new one through metamorphosis, as symbolised by a moth? It is left to the individual – and while some enjoy that depth, my honest reaction was that it was a lazy and disappointing way to end the short, and I certainly wanted more definitive answers after such a beautifully-crafted beginning.  

Higglety Pigglety Pop! or There Must Be More to Life

 I didn’t know much about Maurice Sendak before the hipster-friendly Spike Jonze adaptation of his Where the Wild Things Are. It wasn’t part of my childhood and though I’d seen those iconic illustrations before – as well as Sendak’s weird In The Night Kitchen and his lovely old-fashioned drawings for Little Bear, the latter of course having a charming animated series – but the film was a memorable, brilliantly melancholy work. But it was not until his tragic passing that I heard of Higglety Pigglety Pop!, and the fact that it was his favourite of all his stories.

Written as an affectionate tribute to his recently-deceased dog as a way of coping with both that loss and, according to most reports, the loss of his mother, the story is a stream-of-consciousness-like flight of fancy in the Alice in Wonderland vein. Silly, selfish little doggie Jennie, despite having every whim taken care of, decides there must be more to life and runs away from home. She meets a pig advertising for a new leading lady for a theatrical troupe, but the position requires experience. From a feline milkman she learns of a vacant position for a nanny – which will, she is assured, be an experience. So after helping herself to most of the milkman’s deliveries, she becomes a nanny for Baby, only to find out that the nannies who fail to feed the querulous child get thrown to the huge lion in the basement. Will she be able to do it? And when push comes to shove, will she remain self-serving or grow up a little and learn to sacrifice herself for others?

Though the ‘animation’ here is minimal – Clyde Henry Productions were approached after the success of the stop-motion Madame Tutli-Putli but did not have time to create another such a short in the time they were given so opted for puppetry – the aesthetic is very in-keeping with animation and the human characters are the ones who look odd in the world. Still frames of this short look remarkably realistic and the cat costume in particular is a phenomenal piece of craftsmanship.

Included as an extra in the Blu-Ray of Where The Wild Things Are, this peculiar and entertaining little extra is well worth a watch, and perhaps more excitingly for me, led me to the other Clyde Henry Productions short, which I watched straight after.