Verified Document

How Japanese Are Entertained Through Puppetry Essay

¶ … Impression The wonderful combination of beautiful, almost life-like Japanese puppets with traditional music makes this film quite musical, along with theater. The puppets used in the film, and seen throughout about 400 years of traditions, are not puppets as Americans would think of as puppets. They do not dangle from strings, and there is no one with a hand inside the puppet to make it move, the way children are entertained at typical American puppet shows.

These are beautiful doll-like figures, moving at the command of the performer holding the puppet. Watching a show at the Bunraku Theater in Osaka (which begins with someone clapping two wooden instruments together as the curtain opens) a viewer notes that the narrator sits next to a man playing a long banjo-like instrument which is called a shamisen (it has a long neck and three strings).

The film's narrator explains that there are three kinds of shamisen instruments. One has a thick neck, one a medium size neck and one with a thin neck. On the thin necked shamisen the sound is quite high, and it gets lower with each level of thickness.

The narrator holds the script up to his forehead in a show of respect. It is interesting that the narrator sings (and speaks in a high voice) all the lines for the actors holding the puppets on the stage.

The unique presentation features three men with each puppet; the man holding the puppet moves it around, synchronized with the song being sung and the drum being beaten. He operates the head and the right arm. The other two puppeteers...

The swaying and other movements by the puppet keep the audience (a full house) riveted on the puppet, with painted face in ancient Japanese traditional style.
Every now and then the narrator screams, his voice matching the action of a puppet. The play takes an entire day to perform, but it is broken up into acts. In the background while the narrator is singing / wailing / screeching is the sound of the shamisen. Unless the film viewer speaks or understands Japanese language, the play cannot be fully understood. But the intricate heads that are backstage, with over 100 wigs available, shows the film viewer how serious this puppet theater is about creating plays with every conceivable expression and every emotion familiar to Japanese people available on display with the puppets.

The film narrator says there are about 30 different kinds of male heads, and about ten female heads. These heads have faces with every imaginable expression, so they are interchangeable and can be substituted depending on what kind of character the play calls for. The faces can change without changing the head, too; the film shows how a woman's face on a particular head suddenly becomes a demon-like face, due to the puppeteer pulling a string or tripping a level behind the head.

One head even splits in two, when hit by a sword; so there is violence associated with these cultural puppet shows. These are not necessarily stock heads. They get painted before a puppet show to reflect the particular personalities…

Cite this Document:
Copy Bibliography Citation

Related Documents

Doll's House Henrik Ibsen's Play a Doll's
Words: 3654 Length: 12 Document Type: Essay

Doll's House Henrik Ibsen's play A Doll's Housemade him the father of modern literature. His writing showed tragedy and drama in a new and rather modern way. Prior to an analysis of the story at hand, it is only relevant that the plot and main characters are discussed in detail. This story does not revolve around a whole bunch of characters and is based on only a few days. The story

Doll's House Henrick Ibsen's Work, a Doll's
Words: 642 Length: 2 Document Type: Essay

Doll's House Henrick Ibsen's work, A Doll's House, focuses largely on the theme of obligation, which can be viewed in turn as a basis of the human experience to which all human beings can relate. In viewing this overarching theme of "obligation" within the text, the reader can not only see the ways in which Ibsen uses specific literary devices to hone in on this theme, but lays the basis for

Dolls House Doll's House Henrik
Words: 1534 Length: 5 Document Type: Term Paper

He feels that Nora's freedom is not a reality since she couldn't possibly just leave her house and establish her own identity without money. "Nora needs money -- to put it more elegantly, it is economics which matters in the end. Freedom is certainly not something that can be bought for money. But it can be lost through lack of money." (Found in Schwarez) In short, whatever were the reasons

Feminism and A Doll's House
Words: 3256 Length: 11 Document Type: Research Paper

Feminism and "A Doll's House" In the globe, feminism is a common practice in the social customs of both developed and developing nations. This is because, in both cases, there has been an apparent similar portrayal of women, who have gone through various phases of social levels compared to the consistent social dominance, which is evident in almost every society in the globe. Feminism seeks to know why women continue to

Henrik Ibsen's a Doll's House Henrik Ibsen's
Words: 1295 Length: 3 Document Type: Term Paper

Henrik Ibsen's a Doll's House Henrik Ibsen's characters are not the people they appear to be. On the surface and at the beginning of the play audiences see typical people, pursuing typical lives with typical problems. Not until the play progresses, and in retrospect, do audiences realize that society negatively or positively stimulates the characters motives and actions. This paper looks at three such characters in Henrik Ibsen's play A

Henrik Ibsen's a Doll's House
Words: 1632 Length: 4 Document Type: Research Paper

" Ibsen demanded justice and freedom for every human being and wrote a Doll House to inspire society to individualism and free them from suppression." (http://www.helium.com/items/1121047-henrik-ibsen-dolls-house). In the play, the family exists in the way society defines it -- a husband, a wife, children and a home; but in reality it is just a collection of strangers living in the same house. For Nora the crisis of blackmail and her husband

Sign Up for Unlimited Study Help

Our semester plans gives you unlimited, unrestricted access to our entire library of resources —writing tools, guides, example essays, tutorials, class notes, and more.

Get Started Now