When Puppets Became Cinema: GOMA's Bold Defence of the Creature Shop

There is a moment in The Dark Crystal — 1982, pre-CGI, pre-digital anything — where the Skeksis Chamberlain extends a hand and the joints move with a wrongness so precise it makes your skin crawl. You know it's a puppet. You know someone's hand is inside it. And it doesn't matter. The discomfort is real. The revulsion is real. The artistry is so complete that the artifice becomes the point.

This is the territory GOMA is stepping into with Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company — and the exhibition treats this not as nostalgia but as a serious curatorial proposition. The exhibition, opening 12 September and running through to April 2027, will be accompanied by three cinema programs at the Australian Cinémathèque — the only dedicated cinémathèque in an Australian art museum — comprising more than 90 films across the exhibition's seven-month run.

It is, in the best sense, a gallery behaving like a gallery: not just displaying objects but building the intellectual scaffolding around them. You can see Big Bird's feathers under glass, then walk downstairs and watch Sesame Street Presents: Follow That Bird on the big screen. The Gelfling and Skeksis puppets sit in cases; The Dark Crystal and its behind-the-scenes documentary The World of the Dark Crystal play in the cinema. The object and its cinematic life are held in the same building, and the visitor is invited to draw the lines between them.

Three Programs, Three Arguments

The first program, Screened to be Believed: The Jim Henson Company, does the expected work — the Company's own productions, from The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986) through to the Queensland-filmed The Portable Door (2023). This is the Henson most people know: the dreamer who built worlds out of foam, fabric and conviction.

The second, Where the Wild Things Are Made: Jim Henson's Creature Shop, makes a more interesting argument. These are films where the Henson Company's effects shop did the creatures but didn't make the film: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), Babe (1995), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). The program reframes the Creature Shop not as a side operation but as an artisanal atelier — a workshop whose craftsmanship shaped the visual language of a generation of cinema. The half-shell heroes, the talking pig, the interplanetary menagerie — these were built by hands, not rendered by software, and the films carry that physical weight in ways audiences felt without ever naming.

The third program is the boldest. Beyond Henson: Puppetry and World Cinema steps outside the Henson orbit entirely, surveying puppetry's role in international cinema. Lav Diaz's The History of Ha (2021) — from the Filipino master of slow cinema — sits alongside Spike Jonze's Being John Malkovich (1999). The program's implicit claim is that puppetry in cinema is not a genre or a novelty but a tradition, one that runs from Henson's workshop through to the slowest, most demanding corners of international art cinema.

“The discomfort is real. The revulsion is real. The artistry is so complete that the artifice becomes the point.”

— Phillipe Blake

Why a Gallery Should Programme Cinema

QAGOMA Director Chris Saines CNZM frames the cinema programs as an extension of the gallery's broader mission — "highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the screen and broader visual culture." It's a position that treats cinema as visual art rather than entertainment, and the cinémathèque as a gallery space that happens to project light instead of hanging canvases.

Assistant Curator and film program curator Victoria Wareham goes further: "The cinema programs reveal the influence of The Jim Henson Company upon the broader canon of on-screen puppetry." A canon. Not a novelty. Not a subsection of children's entertainment. A canon, with a history and an international scope, in which Henson is a central but not solitary figure.

This is the cultural argument the exhibition and the cinema programs make together: that puppetry — the art of making something lifeless seem alive — has always been cinema's quiet accomplice, and that it deserves the same serious attention we give to cinematography, production design or performance.

The Practical Bit

All screenings are free, with sessions on selected Wednesday and Friday nights and throughout the day on Saturdays and Sundays. The exhibition Make, Believe, Magic: The Worlds of The Jim Henson Company runs at GOMA from 12 September 2026 to 18 April 2027. Exhibition tickets and full cinema program details at qagoma.qld.gov.au.