Awakening
Silence reigns in the puppet-master's workshop until the puppet left in the vice starts moving and tears itself free. From a box labelled 'Noses and ears' the half-finished puppet finds a suitable nose and ears. When it has finally chosen a pleasing appearance for itself, the puppeteer's workshop suddenly comes alive. The birth of Kõps is welcomed by various famous and unknown puppet film characters, who give him a very special automobile: a film car with a huge camera so that Kõps can travel the world, discover and record it.

Funky road movie à la Estonie
These are the opening shots of the 1964 puppet film Cameraman Kõps in the Kingdom of Mushrooms. The next minutes unroll what might be the world's first puppet road movie. The action, after all, is initiated by two mushroom fanatics who speed along in their car, occasionally finding mushrooms on forest paths. The director Heino Pars said in an interview that Kõps, who got his name from his daughter's doll, and the Forest Sage whom Kõps takes along with him were in fact seated in the car because of the puppeteers' comfort, and not that of the puppets. After all, animating a walk from one mushroom to another would have been too time-consuming. However, not all Kõps films - four altogether - take place in a speeding car. The film Cameraman Kõps in Berryland (1965) shows Kõps and the Forest Sage riding through a super-digital magnifying glass, and they never actually manage to get further than the laboratory. The dialogue between the mentor and the disciple develops swimmingly and instructively. Cameraman Kõps on an Uninhabited Island (1967) obviously tries to explain to children how to survive in the world and in nature, and how to observe without the help of machines what you normally do not see with your naked eye. The only limitation is your own wisdom and experience.

shot from cameraman kõps

Puppet, time and climate
Although the Forest Sage travelling with Kõps is a pleasant and instructive companion for a child who could tell the name of a species living in the forest or marshland, the world where the two characters travel is quite utopian. A boy-puppet-camera lens is a mixed contraption from a box of toys, put together by laboratory information and mechanical know-how. On the one hand, everything is very simple - the puppet film using mixed techniques depicts life in several different ways, from the puppeteer's motions (classic puppet animation) to filming the growing of real plants shot by shot (pixilation). Normal filming, where the camera takes 25 shots a second, is used as well. On the other hand, this kind of mixed technique forms a dense and compact popular-science construction, which makes it possible to present difficult life-size examples in sketch or draft form instead. And who knows - the puppeteer might also want to introduce various sides of the passage of time, when he tries to show the viewer different ways of movement and perception.

Stimulation
A child has no choice in life but to move away from the toy box - away from the dolls and their body parts. Away from moving bodies altogether, because a room full of movement can be unpacked only by the viewer and those who view even further. This room feeds on the camera's hungry glance in every place where man can possibly set foot - on a forest path, inside a mushroom rhizome, in the era of fossils. This is a cameraman's natural habitat and this is where the 'zoo' of time models belongs. Without this, you might have to wait for a picture from life forever, whereas another picture crops up everywhere, like mushrooms after rain, so that you cannot really see very far.
Kõps, with his swiftly reacting camera, shows how to find the suitable objective, moment or angle. In the film, the mushroom research centre in the forest and the lab manned by insect scientists are perspectives where an ignorant person might learn something by way of a magnifying glass or a camera. In another film, however, where cameraman Kõps must make do without a camera (Cameraman Kõps on an Uninhabited Island), there is no such possibility, and both Kõps and the viewer have to create their own ways of seeing.

Puppet films naturally contain no perfection of life, which casts its sounds through the shadows by means of rustling woods and open seas. Also, the puppet film has no emptiness of death that would try to erase real life, without leaving even the traces of erasure behind. What the puppet is made of and what the puppet does provide animation with character, independent of time. Such a machine that keeps challenging time produces tiny time-cubicles, time-circles, time-veins in our so-called universe, be it a mouse-hole, starry skies or the inside of a hat. In the layers of the animated world this time sets into a prism, where the eye can see everything in the light of reanimation of the body parts gathered in a lab. The ants are saved from drowning, and artificial respiration is performed on them. Fossils are brought to life, and ancient wisdom is gained from them. Animation refuses to let anything escape revival. So, all in all, this time is just another chunk of plasticine for both the lab wizard and the puppeteer.

Jaak Rand (1977), cultural theoretician, graduated from the Tallinn University in semiotics; has published articles and literary works in various media issues. In 2005 received the Betti Alver award for the short story collection Jaak Rand and Other Stories (together with Mart Kangur and Ivar Ravi).