I don’t have to inform you that Jim Henson’s work is ubiquitous and beloved, foundational to childhood throughout a number of generations of “Sesame Road” watchers and stretching far past. It’s so essential to us that when one in all his creations, Elmo, “requested” an innocuous query about individuals’s psychological state on social media this winter, the responses appeared … effectively, it was lots.
Clearly, his puppets and Muppets and tales and humorousness don’t lose their energy with time. However to everybody apart from Muppet obsessives, Henson the artist continues to be a bit shadowy. Excellent news: Now we’ve got “Jim Henson Thought Man” (on Disney+), a tribute to the artist and a treasure trove of archival footage and interviews about his work and life. Although it borders on hagiography, it’s not blind to Henson’s faults, and it boasts a aptitude for the surprising.
The movie, directed by Ron Howard, begins with Henson and two of his Muppet mates, Fozzie Bear and Kermit the Frog — Henson’s alter ego — being interviewed on TV by none apart from Orson Welles. In his sonorous baritone, Welles calls Henson “Rasputin, as an Eagle Scout.” The film units out to indicate what he meant.
A number of years in the past, Marilyn Agrelo’s documentary “Road Gang: How We Acquired to Sesame Road” (for lease on main platforms) — additionally very a lot price watching — crammed in among the story, with digressions for example the zany, hilariously violent sense of absurdist humor that Henson delivered to his early industrial work.
“Jim Henson Thought Man” spends longer in the identical territory, whereas specializing in Henson’s life (he died in 1990 at 53), his artistic collaborations (together with these together with his spouse, Jane, and with Frank Oz) and his insatiable have to hold pushing his boundaries.
There’s a lot to like right here: outdated, gut-splitting commercials; behind-the-scenes footage and tales from “Sesame Road” and “The Muppet Present”; and explorations of “The Darkish Crystal,” “Labyrinth” and “The Muppet Film.” However what struck me particularly was that Howard has made a film that each younger artist ought to watch (and older ones, too), whether or not they’re making puppets, work, music, films or something that requires artistic labor.
That’s as a result of the movie reveals that Henson’s work was rooted in an unquenchable drive for exploration. One interviewee notes that he was lured into engaged on “Sesame Road” by the promise that he may make the type of brief experimental movies he liked — and all of the sudden I spotted that my style for unhinged abstraction in movie had been partly formed after I was 4 and plopped in entrance of PBS.
Brian Henson, Jim and Jane’s son, notes that each his mother and father had a “subtle appreciation of nonsense and absurdity,” which is typically echoed in the perfect younger comedians and artists whose movies roll throughout my social media feeds. There are younger Hensons throughout us, and their price can’t be measured purely in clicks and sponsorship offers.
The immense enjoyment of “Jim Henson Thought Man” comes with merely watching humorous, obsessed weirdos like Henson and his mates doing one thing no person else was doing, one thing few individuals do anymore: taking youngsters’s leisure (and later grownup leisure) critically as craft. I’ve heard naysayers argue that it’s foolish to ask youngsters’s films to be any good, since they’re only for children. However Henson knew higher: Each alternative to make one thing was an opportunity to discover with the viewers. There’s a cause, then, that his work lasts.
