Making a Puppetoon

Stop motion animation should seem primitive today but there’s still something warm and touching about the best of the films made by George Pal for Paramount. Pal moved on from shorts when they simply got too expensive to make.

His Puppetoon technique won him an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1944. Calling his series “Madcap Models” was purely alliterative. There wasn’t really anything madcap about Pal’s work, certainly not in films such as Tulips Will Grow and John Henry and the Inky-Poo.

Pal’s main character is viewed as an unfortunate stereotype today. At the time, nothing would have been thought of it. Jasper is involved in telling the story of the Puppetoons to a United Press reporter in an article published on July 20, 1945.

PUPPETOONS' RESENT TRADE COMPARISONS
George Pal Gets 'Oscar' For Three-Dimensional Movie Shorts.
By ED BARLOW.
United Press Staff Correspondent.
HOLLYWOOD.—(UP)—Hollywood's only wooden-headed Academy Award winner became highly indignant when I suggested he might someday surpass Pinocchio.
"Who's this character pistacchio? Never heard of him! Who starred him and what'd he do?" Jasper and his crow-packin' friend the Scarecrow were really mad now.
"Well—uh—he was a puppet, you see, and he wanted to lose his strings, and uh—that is—"

"Well, sho 'nuff, boy, do you see any strings on me anyhow?" the Scarecrow was wielding an oversized razor so I agreed he was absolutely stringless.
When I had assured them they made Pinocchio a piker, the stars of George Pal's "Puppetoons" sat down and gave me their life histories.
Seems there is—are—thousands of Jaspers. Just as animated cartoons use a separate drawing on celluloid for each movement, Pal builds a separate wooden figure or puppet. Twenty-eight leading ladies are needed for one complete wink of an eye.
Every figure and all the scenery, props and settings are turned out by hand. It is the third-dimensional effect thus created that won Pal a special "Oscar."
Script writing and composition of music are the first steps in one of these productions. Then miniature sets are created, exact in every detail, by skilled craftsmen.
"Tellim about the paint, the paint, the paints," squeaked the bobbing crow. Seems the paint room is a nerve-center of the Pal studios.
"Yawsuh, all of me is gotta be painted exactly the same way with all them lines in just the same place or ah jumps around like ah had strings," commented Jasper.
Arms and legs are made of flexible materials and animated by men who have developed a skill for maintaining registration with every movement.
All the tricks of stage lighting and color can be employed in the technicolor "Puppetoons," since everything is three-dimensional.
"Whatchyall mean with this here third-digressional hocus-po-lukus. I ain't no digressional scarecrow. I is a Democrat."
Music, dialog and sound effects are recorded in advance and the action inserted later to insure perfect synchronization in the finished film.
"Cawt, cawt, camera. Look at that hunk of junk, willya?"

The camera isn't the regular three-strip technicolor affair, but a specially-designed job. Exposures are made on a single negative thru varicolored filters by means of a color wheel on the camera. A special attachment permits variation of length of ex posure on each screen frame, and the color records are separated on a special printer and made into the finished product.
Small lens apertures, much as used in still photography, aid in creating depth of field and the extra dimension effect.
"There y'all go with the digression stuff again."
Pal's stars really should speak with a Dutch accent, since they got their start in Eindhoven, Holland, where the Puppetoon idea got its start under sponsorship of large advertisers.
Pal, an architecture graduate and artist, trained a large staff of specialists in Holland and soon had the largest animation studio outside the United States.
Then he was brought to Hollywood by Paramount.
One part of the Pal studio is blocked off nowadays, with a sign proclaiming it the business of Uncle Sam only. Some of Jasper's distant cousins are being used in army training and educational films bearing top hush-hush ratings.
"Yeah, and you tell this here peanutsio or whoever not to go a-triflin' around in our territory or we'll splinter him like a toothpick—yah heah us?"

Pal’s last short was Rhapsody in Wood (1947), ending up with seven Oscar nominations in total for his Puppetoon releases. Pal then jumped into feature films. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and passed away in 1980 at the age of 72.