There are moments when the spark of creation is suddenly lit and the story stops. Like when the Wright brothers made a plane fly. Or when Oreos added double stuffing. Perhaps just as resonant was when Jim Henson He cut his mother’s green coat into strange shapes and added ping-pong balls for eyes.
At that moment Kermit the Frog was born, which would delight several generations. René’s humble beginnings are part of the exciting and enlightening documentary Jim Henson: Idea Manand it is appropriate to start with the sweet and extroverted René, who is in many ways the alter ego of Henson.
The Disney+ film, directed by Ron Howardis a kinetic mix of show clips, interviews, gaffes, behind-the-scenes workplace videos, home movies, and artist sketches, as animated as the Muppets of Hensonwho educated millions of people in Sesame Street and had even more fun The Muppet Show.
Viewers are guided chronologically through the early years of Henson In rural Mississippi, his partnership with his wife, Janein early late-night television appearances, his often strange sensibility, his doubts, the embrace of educational television, the collapse of his marriage, the height of fame and then the fall with Labyrinth. It is the most definitive thing that can be found. We even learn why she decided to grow a beard: acne scars.
It is also a portrait of a creative, motivated, brilliant man who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist and who throughout his life had ambivalent feelings about becoming America’s favorite preschool entertainer. The screenwriter Mark Monroe It seems that he often felt corseted, like an arm trapped in the felt body of a puppet.
Viewers will walk away with a deeper understanding of a man who was such a presence in their childhood. When one realizes that Henson was, at heart, an experimental filmmaker, he better understands the extravagant and psychedelic videos of Sesame Street or why the Great Gonzo eats a rubber car tire “Flight of the Bumblebee”.
The voices that Howard has achieved are fantastic, from Frank Oz (Burt to Henson’s Ernie), the puppeteer Fran Brillthe puppet builder/costume designer Bonnie Erickson and the actresses Jennifer Connelly and Rita Moreno. The brief entries in his own diary Henson – “I am attending a seminar in Cambridge on children’s television workshops” – are also used, as are the images of his funeral, a joyful event.
A strange objection is the decision of Howard –who apparently met with Henson once, briefly – of placing the interviewees in a gray, sterile room with brick walls. Why return there to honor a figure who opposed formality?
Frank Ozthe voice of Miss Piggy and Ernieadventure companion of Henson for decades, he is wonderfully candid about his yin-yang relationship with Henson –“it was, at the same time, a joy and a nuisance”-, just like the children of Henson about his father, who died in 1990.
“There was honesty and integrity in what I created. He created it because he needed to create it,” says one of them. Another concludes: “he demonstrated that creativity, art, metaphor can be used as a great power for good.”
There are fascinating moments – like when we find out that Rene was not originally a frog – to more sublime ones, such as the spectacular entrance of Miss Piggy as a star in his own right. (Viewers may shake their heads when they learn that all networks initially moved from The Muppet Show and that had to be done in England.)
It is a documentary, in short, about creativity and a singular mind, which was created by a group of friends for life: Big Birdhe Cookie Monsterhe Count and of course, Renesewn from an old coat.
Jim Henson: Idea Mana premiere of Disney+ which begins airing on Friday, is rated TV-PG. Duration: 108 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
Fountain: AP. Photos: (Disney+ via AP), AP Photo/ G. Paul Burnett, File.
