Puppet film director Mait Laas, you have produced some rather weird films and used interesting methods, for instance having both live actors and puppets in one film, searching for the boundaries between the living and the lifeless, between the soulful and the soulless... Are such metaphysical problems essential for you?
I don't think this fascinates only me, but also everybody who deals with issues of the soul. In our teens we all reflected on various fundamental topics. This is a universal problem, and there is no point in trying to distinguish a film-maker from anyone else working in a different field, because musicians or architects, for example, also aspire to metaphysics, in order to understand the essence of man. It is naturally most successful in border situations where we most acutely perceive and understand ourselves and the essence of things. The world should not, in fact, be regarded from the point of view of prescribed schemes; instead it should be examined as a living science. I think animation is most effective here.

Speaking of methods, animation is quite different from the tools used by an architect or a writer. How do these specific methods influence the conveying of the message?
True, the methods are very different, but the construction is still the same: I am referring to my earlier words about seeking and finding the essence of man. As for the means and tools of animation as a field of art, their main difference from those of an architect or a writer lies in the fact that they offer more space for playing. A film, after all, contains both architectural timelessness and temporal progress, just like, for instance, in music.
The cinema itself is only one hundred years old, but its previous history reaches far back, to the beginning of time. Already then, man used a puppet or puppet-related issues to determine his consciousness. In different cultures puppets have also been ritual objects. For us, it is probably associated with childhood, when we played at real life through puppets... In that sense the methods available to an animator are not that important, as the most important factor is the puppet itself. As a symbol, however, it is universal, indeed offering a vast space for playing.

mait laas

Can we thus assume that a puppet film provides greater creative freedom than some other field of art?
I think we can. A puppet film can, in a sense, be seen as the art of all art, because it tries to involve all areas of art. It therefore lies in a border state, as any film reflects the real world to some extent; it seems to have three-dimensional space, although we know very well that it is projected onto the screen... It thus has physical boundaries set by the film medium itself. A puppet film differs from a traditional film in a more specific sense in that the actors are not flesh and blood humans, requiring feeding and watering, but totems made from wood, plastic or other synthetic materials: puppets. There is a big difference. Playing with puppets naturally affords more liberty than dealing with live actors.
Purely technically, a puppet film is therefore creatively an extremely free genre, where we can produce innumerable parallel worlds, each with its own soul. A puppet film reaches the fantasy, metaphysical or dream world and, to be quite honest, puppets do have a comprehensive meaning, as noted before. We can for example regard them as real objects, perhaps resembling most of all the sculptures in a city street, which in addition to aesthetics also have an abstract, semiotic meaning. A puppet dog, for instance, is never one specific dog, but has a wider meaning, representing all dogs, something like Aristotle's understanding of forms...
In that sense a puppet allows its creator vast creative freedom. However, cinema, including puppet films, is an expensive genre. The amount of energy required to achieve a result is greater than, say, in literature. As a writer, you can easily create something on your own, sitting quietly in a corner and using simple tools; after all, this is usually individual work. Equally simple is the reception of literature: the author can write for himself, for his friend, for an imaginary reader...
In puppet films, everything is more complicated. A film is not born as the activity of one person; instead it is a collective effort, where everybody contributes according to his specific skills and ideas. Regarding the cost of making a film, it is therefore obvious that no creator imagines one person as his audience; rather the audience is much bigger. In that sense, a film - including a puppet film - is more restrictive as far as the artist's responsibilities are concerned.
However, the film's advantage is certainly the fact that it is a dream for many. Watching a film is a unique social activity: people gather at a certain time in the cinema in order to share in the collective dream presented to them on the screen. To me, this constitutes the essence of the art of film. We can all see our individual dreams separately, just as we can interpret them personally; but it is quite another matter if we all dream together. The position of explaining collective dreams is desirable to critics, but in fact the initially collective dread becomes individual during the process of watching, and each viewer tries to interpret it himself, searching for individual associations within himself and then trying to awaken them...

The phenomenon you mentioned is something that has always been part of the history of film and naturally also of the history of the Estonian puppet film in its unchanged form. Hence the next question: ignoring for the moment technical changes, what has actually changed in the studio Nukufilm (Puppet Film) during its fifty-year existence?
I am not the best person to answer this, as I belong to a younger generation. Still, the makers of our very first puppet films, Elbert Tuganov and Heino Pars, are still alive, and have quite often talked about their experiences and their observations. Radical changes have of course taken place during the past fifty years, although essentially things are the same. One reason is that making puppet films is not an activity of a small group of people, but it inevitably reflects, at least here, the surrounding social environment. It always tries to tackle topical social problems and even the most painful issues. In my opinion, here lies the key to the phenomenon of the Estonian puppet film.
Changes in society have always been reflected in the choice of the subject matter in puppet films. The first films quite clearly represented a social commitment. They were directed at children, as this was the ideology of the time. However, in the 1970s, films for adults appeared as well. Considering the situation back then, they quite sharply tackled the problems of the individual's relationship to society and power, for example the possibilities available for individuals to realise their ideas in Soviet society. The 1980s, when the younger generation emerged, including Hardi Volmer, Riho Unt, Kalju Kivi and Rao Heidmets, witnessed a number of somewhat absurd and surreal films. That, too, was connected with perceiving and reflecting the ideology of the era. The 1990s brought about a drastic change for Estonia as a whole, with ideological pressure disappearing also from films. During the last fifteen years the puppet film has dealt with people's existential problems; it is no longer connected with a specific ideology, but instead relies on personal identity. So great changes have occurred, but what has remained is the courage and will to experiment.

during the shooting of generatio

As a bystander, I have the impression that while, in the case of Eesti Joonisfilm studio, we can talk about a commonly accepted pictorial language or a visual school, this is not true of Nukufilm. It still seems that Nukufilm possesses a common ideological tradition, expressed in playfulness and constant seeking...
You are basically right. Nukufilm lacks a 'visual' world or a methodology of treating certain topics. To a certain extent, this is due to the puppets themselves, but we can still speak of the multiplicity of visual schemes and approaches, supplemented by experiments and a moment of surprise. I would say that the above-mentioned phenomena indeed constitute the ideological tradition of Nukufilm, which unites films by very different film-makers. Each new film tries to expand the borders for perceiving the real world, and also offers a wider world-view to viewers. In a sense I am contradicting myself, as inevitably this is metaphysical lab work, but there is no denying that a puppet film is meant for the viewer, the audience, and not just for the closest friend. This activity somewhat resembles scientific work. Considering visual art, including comic strips in the papers, paintings at an exhibition or performances, they are all different sides of one large phenomenon, although they are all figurative arts. Animation tries to connect these sides. On the one hand, then, we represent the world of comic strips - to many this is in fact all that animation has to offer - and, on the other, we represent a more serious, 'symphonic' side, often preferred by ourselves. To us, animation is a way to perceive the world...

But this is not so everywhere. Take, for example, the production of the big English studio Aardman. This primarily involves consumer goods, clearly in contrast to the occasionally quite elitist work of Nukufilm. Hence a question - who is the audience of the Nukufilm production? How could we determine it?
Well, as a film-maker I do not often have the chance to meet my public, especially since the majority of the puppet films made in Estonia mostly circulate at various festivals. However, we have produced films that are meant specifically for wider audiences; for example, the children's films of the Mirjam series, or the Saamuel trilogy, which is more directed to adults but is still very much in the entertainment category. Thinking about the trilogy, I would like to say that however 'scientific' our work might be, we certainly do not operate in an airtight laboratory, out of reach of viewers' expectations... Our film-makers and our films are very different indeed, but so is the public. On the one hand, we have film aficionados with refined taste, who enjoy the carefully composed and elaborate fantasy games by Mati Kütt or Rao Heidmets; on the other hand, there are always cinemas full of children and their parents who hasten to watch films by Riho Unt or Hardi Volmer, and for whom these films are a wonderful way to spend time.

We could perhaps say that, although part of the Nukufilm production is quite elitist, the Estonian puppet film as a whole occupies a more central place than in many other countries.
Yes, it might be true that in a smaller social environment, animation - a subset of film in general - has attracted a great deal of attention. No wonder, really: we hardly have any capacity for more. Next to features and other films that resemble lengthy novels, an animated film is but a miniature or a haiku. Both for technical and financial reasons, Estonia is unable to produce enough full-length features, and thus animation constitutes a kind of compensation for this lack of films and, hence, draws attention.
But I think that another reason why animation is so significant in Estonia is the great skill of our animators. It seems to me that we have reached a sort of perfection in short animated films, which despite their briefness - or perhaps because of it - address almost each individual. They always have something to say, and the concentration is great...

Your own filmography contains both contextually very complicated and very simple works. How do you explain that? Or do we need to explain it at all?
The issues concerning the plot of a film are highly individual, and we should here talk about 'filmosophy'. There are very specific means, perhaps restricted to film only, which convey ideas and are not used by any other field of art. There are certain icons that only film makes it possible to align and use like that, thus providing this type of conveying ideas some general meaning and inner logic... This, to some extent, determines the possibilities of film as a conveyor of ideas.
It is naturally difficult to compare film with other areas of art, because it combines literature, music, applied art, physics and choreography. It is a symbiosis of various arts and, technically, it does not much matter whether the film is complicated or simple. In a sense, this is also true ideologically, as making a film we always do the same thing: convey a message in co-operation with heart and mind.
We could actually say that the message determines the form. What I mean here is that people are, in principle, able to say highly intellectual, as well as very simple, things. It is this very ability that shows an author's skills in moving on different levels. Each creator solves all possible problems himself and chooses a suitable form according to the message.

If the message determines the form, it should then be possible to detect different philosophies in the animation of various countries just by their form?
Absolutely. English animation, for instance, contains something connected with their literary tradition, or at least inspired by it. On the whole it seems to me that their animation is closely connected with literature... This is something that we do not really have. Estonian animation relies more on the picture and we can talk about the language of icons instead. Estonian animation has occasionally been based on literature, but literature has not been translated into pictorial language very often. Literature has certainly provided impulses, and then a film tries to discuss the topics in the language of pictures. This might be a clue to true Estonian 'filmosophy'...
Going further still, I would dare claim that a kind of hallucinatory world might be familiar to Estonians. Otherwise, we wouldn't occupy a leading position on the list of schizophrenia sufferers. In terms of films, I do not actually mean schizophrenia as a disease, but rather as the difficulty of a forest nation in adapting to an industrial and urban civilisation that relies on mutual agreements and tends to neglect a world view based on personal visions.

Speaking of the dominant pictorial language, we cannot avoid the topic of the role of puppets. Considering what was said before, could we perhaps go so far as to claim that the puppet in fact dictates the development of the story?
The puppet is the central character. Just as world-famous film stars determine the essence of a character, so do puppets, by deciding the character's spirituality. At the initial stage of the film, puppets are mere sketches, but they are two-dimensional and the puppet master has to make them three-dimensional later. A lot can change during this period, as quite a few details seem totally different in the two-dimensional world than they are in the three-dimensional. Adding a fourth dimension - time - we may find ourselves in a situation where some moments acquire completely different undertones than initially planned. This need not be all bad...
The peculiarity and the secret power of puppet films thus lies in the fact that the world prepared by the artist and the world actually emerging in material form are largely rather unpredictable projects, because they deal with joining fantasy with reality. We can therefore predict the end result, although we can never totally envisage it. And once again, in the end the progress of the film's story will be directed to some extent by the puppet, to whom the animator gives life...

Can we thus say that writing the script, making all sorts of plans and designs and the storyboard, seems more like protection and prevention magic?
You can put it like that, yes, although I meant the general plan and not so much the nuances. In a sense we could say that the animated world is a peculiar world of dreams, where everybody has his own dreams, and the film-maker is like a good psychiatrist who examines social visions and dreams rather than personal ones. He mixes them up into a film that is then reflected back to the viewer. For that purpose, puppet masters and artists must work really hard to achieve a result close to the fantasy world in the head of the film's author. Of course the fantasy world is much wealthier and closer to perfection, as some losses in the process of making the puppets and the sets are inevitable. These losses are compensated for in various ways and are subservient to general aims... Each different film-maker in the world of animation has different ways of achieving that. This is what makes the animation world fascinating and, although it is possible to watch a film umpteen times, every film as an event is always still unique, magical and mysterious.

Mait Laas (1970) studied art and visual media in Tallinn and Vienna. He is a member of the literary group 14NÜ, the author of many books, and has participated in exhibitions of art and performance art. At the Nukufilm studio he has made about a dozen puppet films, including Trip to Nirvana, The Lightship Kulis with Paavo Matsin, and Generatio, which was a part of the international project of young film directors, Lost and Found.

Questions by Peeter Helme