$the dark crystal puppets$

“Life and death are a circle,” says Kylan (Shazad Latif), but the Skeksis mostly refuse it. The Skeksis have spiritual analogues in the Mystics they were once one race, neither good nor evil, and cannot live without each another. In the resistance, many characters die: soldiers, sisters, and one merciless Skeksi when his lighter half-a Mystic-sacrifices himself. The Gelfling do not fear the end they live harmoniously with Thra and, in death, return to it. “But then came knowledge.” “Is Gelfling slave, if Gelfling does not know it is slave?” asks another. What’s darker than the systematic erasure of truth? “Do you see this face? Once, this was a beautiful face,” says the Collector Skeksi (Awkwafina). It’s a fear of death that impels their power afraid of loss, they take everything.

They insist it doesn’t exist, a lie that quickens the Darkening’s spread in a vicious feedback loop. The cracking and corruption of the Crystal has unleashed the Darkening, a blight that maddens or kills all it touches, including the land. The Crystal is Thra “the more we take, the less it gives,” says one Skeksi, unnerved. “We are eternal!” they declare, talons to the sky. Utilizing the Crystal to mesmerize smaller creatures, they siphon and imbibe their essence. In her temporary but extensive absence, they’ve gained the Gelflings’ trust, exacerbating their class distinctions and ruining the environment they’ve reverse-engineered the Crystal, once a giver of life, to drain it. In both film and prequel, the Dark Crystal is in the Skeksis’ charge, but in Age of Resistance, we learn it was once the Crystal of Truth, entrusted to the Skeksis by Aughra (Donna Kimball), Thra’s caretaker. By psychic vision, arboreal message, and bearing witness to the murder of a lover, three Gelfling-Brea (Anya Taylor-Joy), Deet (Nathalie Emmanuel), and Rian (Taron Egerton)-each discover the Skeksis’ motives (power, of course, and immortality) and lead the path to resistance.Īnd it is relentless. This fate looms over Age of Resistance, in which seven clans of Gelfling currently thrive. In the 1982 film, only two Gelfling remain, their race destroyed by Thra’s rulers, the Skeksis-vulture-like overlords with long teeth and longer nails. The allusions to our world aren’t subtle-environmental destruction, social collapse-and the pathos is bracing, even in foam latex. Watching ten hours of live action without a single human is confounding characters gaze knowingly, weep, mourn, and dribble oatmeal with humanoid nuance. It is another technological masterpiece, employing an all-star voice cast and 180 puppets, with CGI reserved only for landscapes. Thra was reified in The Dark Crystal, and it's here again in Netflix’s Age of Resistance, with Toby Froud-assisted by Brian, his father-as design supervisor. It is a film so Froudian that to watch it is to find my literary memories dream-stitched: perpetually yoked to this cinematic flourishing. Still one of the highest-grossing animated puppet movies of all time, Henson later went on to call it his greatest achievement.

When Henson found Froud’s illustrations, he was so dazzled that he set up a meeting and quickly developed a treatment for the original The Dark Crystal, for which Froud designed the costumes, creatures, and sets. Based on Western European myths, Froud’s creatures are craggy, loamy things, more earthen than chimerical the fairies in his books kidnap children, drink liquor, and inelegantly crouch, green and stained with dirt, as if sprung from the soil. I was ten when I read Faeries, Brian Froud and Alan Lee’s fever-dream of a guidebook to the realm of the fey. Memories are shared between Gelfling, the elven creatures who populate the world of Thra, by placing their soft palms together ( dreamfasting) they can be fastened to physical objects, too ( dream-stitching), so that they might be seen and sometimes held, reachable forever. In The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance, the ten-episode prequel to Jim Henson’s 1982 fantasy epic, The Dark Crystal, memory is a tangible thing-not corporeal, but not wholly ineffable, either.

The dark crystal puppets