Yet again rewatched The Dark Crystal
As a very small child, The Dark Crystal was absolutely one of my favorite movies - maybe in my top two, alongside My Neighbor Totoro. It's the Eiffel Tower of puppet media. It's a tremendous human accomplishment, visually fucking nuts, and very deeply strange in a couple of completely unique ways... Strange even in comparison to similar movies like Labyrinth.
The movie has so many puppets in it! Some of them are only onscreen for, maybe, three seconds. It has some of the most incredible full-body puppet/rubber monster suits I've ever seen. There are maybe four different species of human-sized, full-body-costume rubber creatures in this movie. In some scenes there are between ten and twenty of them onscreen seemingly at once. If you've never seen this movie, you gotta check it out.
We watched the 4k version this week and I was kind of blown away. You can see so much detail on the characters - particularly on the villains! - that it was almost kind of distracting for me. I grew up watching this movie on VHS, where that shit was barely visible!
We also showed it to a friend who seemed pretty underwhelmed by the story, which is very primal and basic and kind of appealingly stupid. The movie opens with a narrator monologue that shows us two different competing species of leaders in this gross fantasy world - the Mystics and the Skeksis - then immediately cuts to footage of a nude, mouse/rabbit/horse/boy type creature, and just says "This is Jen. He is the Chosen One." It's very straight-ahead in its goals, it repeats every fact like five times in a row, and it is therefore absolutely impossible for a six-year-old to misunderstand.
I tried to explain that in this movie, the story is a sort of cracker upon which the delicious cheese of the visuals is served. I don't know if I got through, haha!
Anyway, it was great to see this in an almost distracting, overwhelming level of detail. I was worried that if I could see all the fabrication details of the outfits too clearly - the textures of all the cloth, the weird precision of the gross Skeksis faces - then it would be harder to read them as "beings." I was worried that too much visibility into the artificiality would kind of kill the magic. I had this problem when I saw the 48fps Peter Jackson Hobbit print in the theater! You could see the set shaking when the actors were walking around on it in a couple shots. It made the movie look more fake.
4K doesn't seem to have the same effect on me as framerate, though. I still "bought it" for The Dark Crystal. There's nothing pretending to realism in this movie - it's all artifice and excess, and maybe seeing more excess is better for a movie about excess? Being able to perceive what feels like absolutely microscopic levels of puppet surface detail is pretty sick, actually!!