Are Puppets Considered Animation?

J

Japanese

New member
This question has been bothering me for a while now, and I'd like to know what you think on this. Are puppets considered animation, or not? I tend to not include it as a form of animation mostly because you bring the puppet to life in real time as oppose to shooting one frame at a time like the Rankin/Bass specials, or the works of Tim Burton, and Henry Selick. I ask this because The Muppets are brought up quite often on the forums, and you could say that Jim Henson, Frank Oz, ect. manipulated the Muppets to bring them to life, but in real time. What are your thoughts?
 
Opinions may differ, but I tend to consider puppetry a form of live-action, since live actors operate the puppets and the performances are shot in real time, not frame-by-frame like in animation.
 
Two different kinds of this. The kind you see on Muppets, and the kind you see on Robot Chicken and Titan Maximum. Muppets and Sesame Street is considered Live-action. While, Robot Chicken And Titan Maximum is shot Frame By Frame. So it's animation. So basically it all depends.
 
Robot Chicken is stop motion animation, aka "Puppet Toons", like on the old Rankin-Bass specials and more recently on Nick@Nite's Glenn Martin, DDS.

Even with puppet toons and with clay animation, the animators are taking pictures of several hundred frames and then run those frames in succession, thus creating the illusion of movement. Therefore, I consider puppetry to be live action, since there's no actual animation process involved.
 
Stop-motion is its own kind of animation, and is recognized as such by most authorities.

Stuff like the Muppets is live-action, but if anything is worthy of being called a live-action cartoon, it's them.
 
Animating a puppet in real time is just puppetry. While anything that moves is technically animated, animation is generally frame-by-frame.
 
Well, technically speaking isn't the way a camera functions essentially "frame by frame"? Isn't a video really just many a combination of perpetually taken photos? :p Just kidding, that would mean live-action would be animation, and that would authorize Cartoon Network to air live-action.

Although puppetry like that of Jim Henson has had its own special impact on animation (at least I think so), conventional puppetry is not considered animation itself.
 
The thing to remember here is that puppetry is much older than animation. Puppetry goes back centuries, where as animation is a fairly modern invention.
 
Animation is one big optical illusion, if you think about it. Those drawings aren't *actually* moving; they're just being shown in rapid succession to give the illusion of movement.

Jim Henson-type puppets don't require any similar type of illusion, so I'd classify them as live action.
 
That's informative, but that doesn't make puppetry a form of animation. Puppetry is not animation simply because there's no animation process involved. Puppetry is no more animated than sports mascots who perform at half time shows are animated. Which art form happened to come first is irrelevant to the topic.
 
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