7/25/2005: Amazing French puppetry celebrating Verne

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Thanks to Warch who spots this amazing French street puppetry, celebrating Jules Verne. The images shown here are pretty large but necessary to show the scale and the detail of the thing. It's massive, and it moves around in a natural way via its operators. They also have a massive elephant puppet, see the photo gallery here. Meanwhile the girl walks, rides her scooter, reacts to the crowd:



Warch also found two more amazing galleries before I could even post the images:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/jwz/489202.html

http://www.lean.to/gallery/royaldeluxe

And a full story that explains it in detail:

In 2005, France is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the death of one of its most popular writers: Jules Verne. The many events organised for this national commemoration will principally be held in Nantes, the novelist's birthplace in western France, and in Amiens, his place of residence, in the north.
...
Through his work, science (in the general sense, including the social sciences) became fodder for fiction. From 1862 until his death in 1905, encouraged by his editor Pierre-Jules Hetzel, Jules Verne produced some sixty novels grouped under the broad title Extraordinary Journeys. His genius lies in his ability to draw poetry out of the most austere learning and to create an atmosphere of fantasy based on exact scientific data.

The writer's dreamlike and avant-garde vision will be represented on stage by the street theatre company "Royal de Luxe" during a large town parade and four days of festivities in Nantes, from 19 to 22 May, and in Amiens, from 16 to 19 June.

The programme enticingly announces "The Visit of the Sultan of India Atop His Time-Travelling Elephant". The show will go on tour to Le Havre, in the north of France, in mid-July, then London in September, wrapping up in Bilbao, Antwerp and Calais in 2006. In parallel to this, video director Pierrick Sorin will present a short film on the same theme, inspired by the gigantic, elephant-shaped steam engine imagined by Jules Verne in his novel The Steam House.