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Film Description
Performed entirely by marionettes, this is a fully integrated puppet feature film. It's a dark love of tale and revenge telling the story of young Prince Hal who embarks on a perilous mission to avenge the apparent murder of his father. However, the lines between enemy and ally rapidly blur as it becomes clear that not all is as it is first perceived.
An expertly crafted piece of peculiarity from our Scandinavian cousins. As the opening credits set out, Strings is to be a marionette show performed by master puppetee... more >
An expertly crafted piece of peculiarity from our Scandinavian cousins. As the opening credits set out, Strings is to be a marionette show performed by master puppeteer Bernd Ogrodnik and his team. It takes place - appropriately enough - in a puppet kingdom, where young Prince Hal (voiced, in this English-language version, by James McAvoy) is deceived into waging war against a neighbouring city by the late King’s scheming brother. As Hal sets out to take revenge on the Zeriths he considers responsible for his father’s death, a letter is discovered
pledging peace between the two tribes…
In a formalist quirk, these aren’t puppets styled as, or standing for, humans but instead puppets as puppets, their head-strings serving as lifelines. The kingdom’s babies are born into workshops, made out of wood, given life only when their masters’ strings fall from the skies; the city gate is, in fact, a bar - lowered to the ground to allow puppets to step over and out, raised to prevent anyone with strings
passing through.
These strings tend to get in the way during the film’s action sequences - where it’s like watching a fast-cut game of cat’s cradle - but prove powerful motifs in the quieter moments, such as when a slowly fraying string signifies a life ebbing away. Another twist is designed to make explicit the underlying message of racial acceptance: where Prince Hal is all whitewood and blue eyes, the Zeriths are dark-skinned and dreadlocked, and have their own forms of exotic dance. (One shot, of the statue of an oppressive leader being toppled by the oppressed, is perhaps intended to evoke contemporary scenes in Baghdad.)
By some distance, Strings is the most imaginative and beautifully timbered kids’ film released so far in 2005; I’m almost tempted to suggest it should be held back for children able to demonstrate sufficient strength of stomach and attention span. It’s very Nordic, with no discernible sense of humour; ghostly, even, in its insistence on
animating the inanimate. (The film’s closest relative would be the ghoulish, macabre stop-motion animation of The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb.)
But this is the type of oddity which tends to resonate in the minds of receptive viewers for far longer than the majority of disposable half-term entertainments. With its Chapman Brothers-like string-less spiderbacked slave-puppets and scenes which feel stronger than a PG certificate might normally allow (the last-reel’s puppet apocalypse, for example), Strings is potent cinema: the stuff of dreams and nightmares rather than spin-off computer games and tie-in burger meals. < less
