The genius puppetry behind War Horse

"Puppets always have to try to be alive," says Adrian Kohler of the Handspring Puppet Company, a gloriously ambitious troupe of human and wooden actors. Beginning with the tale of a hyena's subtle paw, puppeteers Kohler and Basil Jones build to the story of their latest astonishment: the wonderfully life-like Joey, the War Horse, who trots (and gallops) convincingly onto the TED stage.

More like this

Good morning. Today is "Mayday Day" in Minneapolis. Mayday is a holiday widely celebrated by the community of South Minneapolis. People from North, Northeast and Southeast are welcome, but I'm not sure they know about it. People from "soutwest" Minneapolis ARE from South Minneapolis and they…
The name Phar Lap comes from an Asian word for lightning; a sky flash. A passing dazzle of light, a spark in the night. And so he was, the big copper racehorse, born in New Zealand, trained in Australia, whose dazzling speed made him one of those unexpected beacons of hope during the Great…
Modern day biological engineering and artificial life research focuses on the microscopic, the molecular, the informational, the stuff of the scientific revolutions of the past one hundred years. Our current synthetic biologies aim to turn the living into the designed, the wet into the…
Breaking down a hyena kill. Given competition with other carnivores, prehistoric hyenas (like their living counterparts) would probably have disarticulated and transported parts of horses they killed. From Diedrich 2010. In Hollywood films, there is nothing like an assemblage of bones strewn…