- THE INSIDE STORY OF JIM HENSON'S CREATURE SHOP
BY MATT BACON.
Film Focus: Labyrinth Where puppets meet people - with the help of the new art of animatronics
"Be careful what you wish for; it may come true." Babysitter Sarah carelessly wishes the Goblins would come and take away her bawling baby brother ... and they do. The Goblin King, Jareth, tells her that her brother will be turned into a Goblin in Thirteen hours. Then he vanishes into his kingdom - the Labyrinth.
Sarah follows him into a strange world of mazes and mysteries, in which little is what it seems. She meets an irritable gnome called Hoggle, who gives her directions, but Sarah is soon lost. Seeking advice from two animated playing cards, she opens a door and plunges down a shaft of grasping hands. At the bottom she meets Hoggle, who agrees to guide her in return for her bracelet.
Misled by a talking door knocker, Sarah finds herself in a forest, where a group of 'fireys' threaten to singe her before she is rescued by Hoggle. On the Bog of Eternal Stench, guarded by the diminutive Sir Didymus, a fox. Sarah smooth talks the fox knight into joining the party and they press on, but Hoggle has a trick up his sleeve - a magic peach given to him by Jareth, which he gives to Sarah. The peach transports her in her imagination to a fairytale ballroom, where she dances many precious hours away. Eventually she wakes up in a junkyard beneath the walls of the Goblin city. Ludo, Sir Didymus and Hoggle rejoin her, and together they enter the Goblin city. Jareth turns lose the giant knight Humungous, and despatches the Goblin guards to deal with the intruders. But they win through to the castle, where Sarah rescues Toby.
For all its technical sophistication, The Dark Crystal was a puppet film. Jim Henson and Brain Froud were convinced that the types of characters they had created for The Dark Crystal could be integrated with human actors. So in 1983, with Star wars director George Lucus as executive producer, they began work on a new fantasy film ... one that would mix actors and animatronics on a scale never before attempted.
The mix-and-match team of Labyrinthe adventurers prepares to do battle. Hand puppets, marionettes, huge costumes and state-of-the-art animatronics (for the time) notwithstanding, the focus on character and performance in Labyrinth has always been a guiding principle of the Creature Shop's work.
"In the very early stages, Jim and I were discussing what it might be about." said Froud, "and we decided 'Goblins.' From there, I started to create pictures and drawings. I filled skectchbook after sketchbook, doodling in corners, creating hundreds of creatures." Henson had been stung by criticisms of The Dark Crystal's perfunctory plot, and this time he was determined that the story would come first, rather than growing out of the creature development. Ex-Monty Python Terry Jones tackled the script, surrounded by Froud's drawings: "Every time I was stuck and needed something to happen, I'd look through Brain's drawings, and there would be a new character speaking to me."
Sarah's encounter with the gang of fire sprites who dance and gambol, occasionally removing a head or two to juggle with, is one of the most vibrant scenes in the film. The sprites were designed by Brian Froud, and operated as rod puppets attached at crucial points to tight black costumes worn by the puppeteers. Because they were filmed dancing against a black background, only the sprites were visible, and the resulting shots were composted into the final scene in the marshland setting. The film was to have a different tone from The Dark Crystal with more comedy - and songs too. "When we started, we had this evil Goblin King," explained Henson in a 1986 interview, "and we started to think, what if he were a rock singer? Who would it be? Sting, Michael Jackson , David Bowie." Bowie had seen The Dark Crystal and was very taken with the idea of doing the same type of film with a lighter comedy script and music. In addition to playing Jareth, Bowie wrote several new songs for the film.
" .... and we started to think, what if he were a rock singer? Who would it be? Sting, Michael Jackson, David Bowie." Labyrinth was going to exploit everything Henson, and the newly formed Creature Shop team, had learnt about animatronics from The Dark Crystal. Where the Dark Crystal's puppets and puppeteers had flirted with radio control, Labyrinth would use it wholesale, and nowhere more so than in the character of Hoggle, the grumpy gnome. "Hoggle is the most complex creature we've ever built," said Henson at the time. "It's the most technically elaborate face we've ever done - there are 18 motors inside the face." Those motors control Hoggle's expression through movements of lips, eyelids, eyebrows, and jaw. Every one is controlled separately, so that a smile, for example, requires coordinated movements of the corner of the lips, jaw and eyebrows. Hoggle is the sum of five performers: petite actress Shari Weiser inside the costume, and four puppeteers, led by Jim Henson's son Brian, working in close harmony to radio-control the movements of Hoggle's ugly-but-cute face.
On his right hand, Brain wore a special mitt, a mechanical analogue of the mouth of the puppet, through which he controlled Hoggle's jaw movements. A similar mitt on the hand of another puppeteer controlled other lip movements. The third member of the team used a fingertip joystick lever to control Hoggle's eyes and eyelids, while the fourth puppeteer used a similar mechanism to animate the eyebrows - and at the same time, a foot pedal to control the skin around Hoggle's eyes for a more effective sneer.
Comments Brain: "Five performers trying to coordinate one puppet is a very tough thing. There's a lot of chemistry involved." The secret lay in weeks of rehearsal, preparing until everyone on the puppet team was able to anticipate each other's every move. There was no room for failure; for as Jim Henson explained, "Hoggle had to be virtually the second lead in the film."
Hoggle, the grumpy, stumpy, gnome, is Sarah's more-or-less constant companion on her journey. As one of the leads, Hoggle was a vital character, and had to be both sympathetic and believable. To achieve the degree of emotion and realism required, Hoggle's face was remote controlled by four puppeteers, who were led by Brian Henson.
Petite actress Shari Weiser, who brings Hoggle to life, listens to directions for her next scene. Although Hoggle's stardom made him the most critical character in the film, there were plenty of other challenges to be met. The eight-foot giant, Ludo, was one of the biggest creatures ever built for one person to operate. The Creature Shop technicians fought a constant battle to keep the costume’s weight down. "About half-way through the build, I got worried and asked them how much it would weigh when it was finished," commented Henson. "They went away and did some calculations, and came back with a figure of a hundred and something pounds. So I said that was too much and they had to start from the beginning and do it all again." Even with the rebuild, Ludo weighed in at over 70 lbs - in fact too much for one person to operate at a time. SO the costume was built so that two puppeteers could operate it interchangeably, taking turns in the hot and dark confines of the beast's belly. Inside the puppeteer hunches over two TV monitors. One relays the scene as it's being filmed by the movie camera and the other the view from the tiny TV camera hidden in one of Ludo's horns. With no other external vision, this monitor was all that stood between Ludo's operator and crashing into the set or tripping over. >>>>>NEXT PAGE
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