A grab bag of various puppet related things that have caught my eye this month:

1. Neil Patrick Harris dreams in puppets.

2. A writer on the website Etsy finds an old Guignol puppet theater in Paris.

3. Our director Carmen found a video of dancers working with paper in a way that is very intriguing. This may not seem to be related to puppets but wait until you see more details on the second half of Kismet and all will make sense.

As you can maybe tell from all the books, I am deep into research for several possible projects, all involving mythology from Ancient Mexico. As I read (and re-read) legends from the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, there is one creation myth that I keep coming back to.

In the Popol Vuh, the oldest documented mythology of the Maya, there is a creation story in which the Heart of Heaven and the plumed serpent Gucumatz try multiple times to create people. On their third attempt they use wood to form men, while women are made of rushes. However because these wooden people lack souls and respect for their creators, the gods decide to destroy them in a flood. So far, this is relatively standard as a creation myth. But the Mayans weren’t content to just drown these early humans. As the story goes, household items such as water jars, tortilla griddles, plates and cooking pots rebelled against the wooden people as well and crushed their faces. Between the rain, the animals and their murderous utensils, there was no place of safety. The story of inanimate objects taking on a life of their own and becoming dangerous figures in other cultures as well and I was intrigued to find this early example from the Americas!

Telling a story can be a messy business, as evidenced by the floor of the studio as I try to work out a new storyboard for Kismet. I cut and glue, trace shapes onto a ground plan and try to visualize in my head all the different pieces and parts of this rather complex tale.

A writer who I find always has wise things to say about storytelling is Philip Pullman, the author of the series His Dark Materials. Pullman recently published a collection of his retellings of Grimm’s fairytales. In his introduction, he talks about various conventions and ideas of good storytelling and he ends with a personal superstition that I found delightful. He says:

‘I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral…the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.’

I hope that the story sprite in charge of the story of Kismet is kind to us over the next several months as we try to tell this story to the best of our ability!

Shaun Tan is an internationally known Australian author and artist of picture books. He has won an Academy Award (Best Animated Short–The Lost Thing) and the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, one of the highest achievements in children’s literature. My first introduction to Shaun Tan was the graphic novel The Arrival, which I read when it was published in the U.S. in 2007. I was immediately captivated by the complex details of this wordless story about an immigrant to an unknown land. Tan’s drawings evoke the sepia tones of early 19th century photographs from Ellis Island, but his world contains odd creatures, strange customs and an indecipherable language–eliciting a strong empathy for the plight of everyone who lands in a new country without understanding the language. As I continued to find and read other stories by Tan, I found that they all evoked that same sense of empathy and wonder–wonder at the strangeness and mystery of his unusual landscapes and empathy for his outsider characters.

Tan often focuses on an object or a character that has been lost–the protagonist of The Arrival or the odd teakettle shaped item in The Lost Thing being two primary examples. Other stories such as The Red Tree communicate emotional turmoil in visceral poetic images. Everyone that I have shown this story to has responded to at least one of the spreads by saying “I know that exact feeling!” Tan also works with material that takes characters through some kind of change, either minor or monumental. In the story ‘the nameless holiday’ from Tales from Outer Suburbia, people choose to give up something special, while in John Marsden’s post-colonial allegory The Rabbits, a civilization is gradually overcome by invaders. From deserts to massive cities, from magical rooms hidden inside houses to backyards filled with brightly painted missiles, Tan draws the reader into the world of his tales with illustrations comprised of collage, nuanced shading, saturated color and precise drafting. Some stories clearly share visual characteristics–the story ‘Eric’ from Tales from Outer Suburbia uses the same quiet greyscale and tiny details as The Arrival–but the Renaissance influenced spreads from the story ‘no other country’ contrast strongly with the torn paper collages from ‘distant rain.’ No matter what the medium, Tan never fails to elicit compassion for his characters–whether they are an immigrant family or scraps of paper in someone’s pocket.

In a 2011 interview with the German newspaper Der Spiegel (you can view it here.) Tan responded to questions with simple illustrations, resulting in some hilarious, succinct responses. I especially like the depiction of Hollywood as a snow globe and Tan’s childhood dream to become either an astronaut or an artist. In the introduction to his most recent publication The Bird King and other sketches, Tan talks about how for him, images “…are not pre-conceived and then drawn, they are conceived as they are drawn. Indeed, drawing is its own form of thinking, in the same way birdsong is ‘thought about’ within a bird’s throat.” This is very similar to how a lot of our work on Kismet has been constructed. We look at materials, arrange and combine them, and start experimenting with movement and interactions. Tan has been our primary inspiration on this project and we look forward to continuing to learn from his work and stories as we create our own.