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Amazing Skill with Unseen Strings gives life to Most Famous Puppets

Thirty Operators Working Eighteen Miles of Wire and String Are Needed to Give a Performance with the 800 Animated Actors that Are Cleverly Molded of Wood

By Robert E. Martin

EIGHT hundred performers, moved by miles of wires and string, are now touring the country presenting the most elaborate puppet show of history. Known as the Teatro dei Piccoli, “The Theater of the Little Ones,” the organization has spent eighteen years in Italy building up its cast. Tap dancers and opera singers, witches and clowns, , bull fighters and pianists, acrobats and jubilee singers, and even a Mickey Mouse give animated performances, amazingly lifelike.
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This would be even cooler if there was a string to make his nose grow.

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Pinocchio the Puppet

HOW TO DUPLICATE THE AMUSING LITTLE MODEL WALT DISNEY’S ANIMATORS USED

By HI SIBLEY

PINOCCHIO, the wistful puppet created by Geppetto, the wood carver, in Walt Disney’s second full-length production, is an inviting subject for either a homemade puppet or an amusing and companionable little doll. The accompanying illustrations show how to go about making one patterned after the original, which was created by the Disney model department as an inspiration to the animators drawing Pinocchio.

If you are an expert wood carver yourself, the head might be fashioned from a solid block of soft white pine and the nose inserted (Fig. 1), but a surer way to achieve a fair likeness is first to make a clay model. From this a plaster-of-Paris mold is taken, and the head is cast in plastic composition wood (Figs. 2, 3, and 4). The hat is made in the same way as the head and glued on.
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You can view the first part of this series here.

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The Secrets of Making Marionettes

By RUFUS ROSE

ARTISTS’ oil paints, obtainable in tubes, offer the best medium for painting marionettes. Flat white paint is used as a ground color to cover all exposed parts. When dry, white enamel is used to get a gloss on the teeth and eyeballs, using a small camel’s-hair brush as in Fig. 30. To get flesh color, mix burnt sienna with flat white paint, sometimes adding small quantities of red, yellow or blue to bring out various skin shades. Apply a spot of vermilion in the center of each cheek and blend it into the flesh color of the face. The lips are painted with a suitable mixture of vermilion and burnt sienna. Shades of blue or brown, or a mixture of both, are used to make eye shadows and lines to imitate wrinkles in the face and hands.
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