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All Creatures Great and Small
"With puppets, a puppet generally you're working symbolically. A puppet is a symbol of whatever you are trying to portray. So, therefore, if you have an evil character, it can look totally evil. It can be evil incarnate. If you have, as we did, old wise characters, they can be completely that and you're not dealing with a live person, an actor who you are imagining in that role. There is only the character yourself and there's a sort of purity to it." - Jim Henson
"The Dark Crystal" exists in its own time and space, says Jim Henson of the fantasy-adventure film he first conceived in 1977, then for which he developed a new technology.
"Its world conforms to no known laws, natural or supernatural," he explains. "It has its own mythology, science, superstition, even its own evolutionary process. Its inhabitants are neither human nor inhuman. They are different."
After all that has come before, from Sesame Street to The Muppet Show, it seemed only natural that Henson would seek new worlds of his own invention to conquer.
On that journey up the rivers of mythology and into the darkest corners of the imagination, he was joined by Frank Oz, his long-time Muppet partner; Gary Kurtz, a veteran of distant worlds via "Star Wars," and "The Empire Strikes Back"; and Brian Froud, Britain's foremost fantasy illustrator.
The scope of their universe is reflected in the characters who inhabit it, among them:
While these creatures grew out of Henson's story sense, they were visualized by fantasy artist Brian Froud, whose books The Land of Froud and Faeries were hailed for their humor and imagery.
The characters were then made three-dimensional by a team of craftspersons, makeup artists, electronics experts, hydraulics engineers, actors, and puppeteers, all working together to create a new story-telling form.
"We see creatures and surroundings in our dreams which, for a moment in time, are marvelously real," explains Froud. "Then our own four walls come into focus. Reality intrudes. It is that moment in time, the walking reverie, when anything is possible - and believable - that we sought to conjure on film."
Creatures not seen before the darkening: golarch, hsilin, yoket khria, vereina, gilyak, cherfas, pbyx, storax, garodemana, khaipokhiu, iosis.
Cherfas the Deceiver is a small swamp-dwelling reptilian of loathsome appearance whose imitations of the calls of larger creatures deceives unwary travelers.
The triadic symmetry of the world of the Dark Crystal extends even to its fauna.
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This is an unofficial DARK CRYSTAL website. THE DARK CRYSTAL, characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of The Jim Henson Company. © 2001. Visit the official website at www.henson.com.