One of those childhood favorites that got me interested in animation at an early age was the Rankin & Bass stop-motion holiday classic Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. When I was young and stupid, I thought that one day I could go to the North Pole and visit Hermey, Yukon Cornelius, Rudolph and the fat, jolly one himself. Now, of course, I know that those characters were just puppets moved around a miniature set one frame at a time. But still, finally meeting them was none the less magical.
Last week I got a call from friends Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh, a pair of brilliant stop-motion animators and founders of production company Screen Novelties in Hollywood. They said they had in their possession the original Santa and Rudolph animation puppets and asked if I wanted to come behold these precious animation artifacts. As if they had to ask.
It’s a strange thing to be star-struck by a puppet. During a visit to DreamWorks, I once got to gaze through glass at Wallace and Gromit in all their clay glory, longing to reach in and put my own fingerprints on their plasticine exteriors. For all intents and purposes, these tiny, articulated dolls are movie stars that will continue to excite and pluck at the heartstrings of audiences long after the latest Hollywood brat pack has faded into obscurity or joined the cast of some cut-rate reality series. And while a number of Wallaces and Gromits were made for the recent feature film, there was only one main hero puppet crated for both Santa and Rudolph, so getting up-close and personal with the real McCoys was a unique treat.
Today, stop-motion puppets are commonly made by injecting foam rubber or silicone into a mold and letting it set around the wire or ball-and-socket armature (skeleton). This is particularly useful if you’re making multiple copies of the same character since the mold can be reused time and time again to get exact replicas. The Rankin & Bass characters, however, were crafted using the build-up method. Santa’s big belly, for instance, is a block of wood covered over by fabric. His arms and legs are made of flexible, lead wire, and his head is a wooden ball that has been cut in half, hollowed out and a reassembled, then covered with paper and a thin layer of wax to give it that sheen you see on the screen.
The nice thing about build-up puppets is that they will virtually last forever if properly taken care of. If you’ve seen photos of some of the dinosaur puppets from the original 1993 King Kong movie, you’ll know that foam rubber tends to deteriorate over time, falling off the skeleton like so much rotted flesh. That said, Ruddy and Santa weren’t exactly well cared for since going in front of the camera in 1963. According to Walsh and Caballero, a good amount of damage was done when a photographer got a hold of them to shoot some publicity photos for the film. Tape used haphazardly to hold Santa’s hat on left tape residue and Rudolph’s large, black irises were unfortunately locked in place with an industrial-strength glue.
After the photo shoot, the puppets were apparently given as a present to someone who worked for Arthur Rankin and brought out every Christmas as holiday decorations. If you look closely at Rudolph, you can see a faint, brown chocolate stain from when they were placed in a candy dish, Santa’s lead boots mingling with the Yule Tide treats.
Robin Walsh, Seamus’ wife, handled the lion’s share of the fantastic restoration job. Santa’s missing mustache was replaced and his beard, which had gone completely yellow, is once again snow-white thanks to a special soap. Rudolph’s signature glowing nose had long been lost and was replaced with a modified L.E.D. so the most famous reindeer of all can once again guide Santa’s sleigh.
We’ll discuss the restoration process with the Screen Novelties gang in greater detail in the near future. Until then, you can go to the Animag Funbag at www.animationmagazine.net/wac/fun_bag.html to check out some exclusive photos of Santa and Rudolph taken at Caballero’s and Walsh’s studio in Hollywood, where they’re currently finishing up a pilot episode for an awesome stop-motion series for Nickelodeon. We’ll take you behind the scenes on that project soon as well.
NaturalMotion Ltd., developer of the Dynamic Motion Synthesis-based animation solutions endorphin and euphoria, announced that it will unveil a third product line this week at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics convention in Boston, Mass. The product launch will take place aboard The Lady Christine, an ocean cruiser parked at the infamous Boston Harbor.
