Anatomy of a puppet. Design driven categories for animated puppets' skin

How many things can a puppet be? Victoria Nelson’s examination of puppets’ history reveals that these objects have always mirrored the specific purposes they have been used for, and the historical periods they have been designed in. Puppets are objects made of material, manufactured according to specific techniques, and produced by human beings in order to satisfy different needs. They hold an interesting attitude to cross fields of application – from technology to art, and from psychology to sociology – and, in each of them, they show specific “anatomies”, characteristics and meanings. The history of puppets happens to be the one of human evolution, because puppets have inhabited human religious rites, technological experiments, artistic purposes and have been used as entertainment tools. This volume focuses on a specific typology of puppets, the animated ones, used as protagonists of stop-motion films. By engaging an interdisciplinary analysis of animated puppets’ manufacturing processes, this book places a challenge: it merges design and film studies’ methods of analysis and applies criteria of material examination of design objects to investigate puppets’ material aspects. As a result the book frames “design-driven” categories of animated puppets that classify stop-motion films according to puppets’ skin material and manufacturing features, and suggests linking those features with historical roots and anthropological scenarios. What happens if these categories are used also for gathering new levels of narratives and interpretations? This question closes the volume, and invites embracing a path of research that relies upon the engaged fields as it suggests giving value to puppets’ material aspects to identify new instruments of interpretation.