- THE INSIDE STORY OF JIM HENSON'S CREATURE SHOP (CONT)
BY MATT BACON.Film Focus: Labyrinth Where puppets meet people - with the help of the new art of animatronics
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Sarah, played by Jennifer Connelly, shares a thought with Ludo, the friendly giant, in Labyrinth. Ludo was designed, built, and performed by the Creature Shop's Ron Mueck, now a successful fine artist. According to his son, Brian, Jim Henson had a liking for big, slow lumbering characters - they are found in many of his productions.
Jennifer Connelly as Sarah, and Ron Mueck, hidden deep inside the giant shaggy Ludo costume, listen as Jim Henson rehearse a scene from Labyrinth.
Inside the shaggy costume, a single puppeteer, either Ron Mueck or Rob Mills, stood bent over a tiny TV monitor relaying the view from a camera in one of the horns, his right hand stretched high to operate the head, and his left inside Ludo's huge paw. In addition to creating one of the largest human-operated puppets ever, the Creature Shop team also built the largest animatronic. "At the end of the film, I thought the characters should come across an enormous obstacle," Jim explained. "So I went into the Shop, and said, 'Boys, I'd like a 15-foot-high-giant.'" Humungous is a robot-like knight, which appears to be no more than a complicated carving on the Goblin City gates until they shut and the creature peels itself off the doors and lumbers into action. Humungous is a bedstead-like walking frame welded from steel tubing. Hydraulic rams power its movements. The whole frame is mounted on a crane-like trolley. At first the engineers built the creature's armour from fibreglass, but when the time came to take the first steps, nothing happened. The fibreglass was too stiff, and wouldn't flex to allow the giant to move.
The solution was to use polyurethane foam instead. One of the Creature Shop's foam experts figured out a way of persuading the foam - normally textured like orange peel - to form a firmer skin that wouldn't wrinkle, so that it could be a convincing stand- in for metal armour.
The huge animatronic weighed several tons, and used a new kind of control mechanism. Instead of "flying" the creature with joysticks, which would have meant coordinating the efforts of another team of puppeteers, Humungous was slave to a single man. The puppeteer fitted his arm into a mechanical skeleton of levers and sensors, which detected his movements and sent signals to the motors and servos in the giant robot, which duplicated them, multiplied tenfold in scale.
The huge robot knight, Humungous, steps forward from his niche in the city gates to do battle with Sarah and her party.
Eccentric and brave, the fox knight Sir Didymous is played by several puppets, including a marionette for full length shots and a hand puppet, operated by legendary Muppeteer Kevin Clash. Labyrinth's animatronics advanced the state of the art to new heights. But one of the most striking scenes in the film was produced using the traditional puppetry skills along the lines of the old hand-in-a-sock routine. When Sarah plunges down the chute of hands, she talks to them, while they group in threesomes to make a variety of fully characterised faces. The Creature Shop created 150 pairs of gnarled, twisted, latex gloves. Some were simply attached to the walls of the towering set, but others were operated by puppeteers, their arms trust shoulder deep through holes in the chute's walls. Sometimes, simple solutions are the best.
Sarah's descent through the chute of hands shows Jim Henson's puppeteers at their most creative, as they team up in threesomes to arrange the pairs of hands into distinctive talking faces.
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