Bunraku

Japanese people are extremely careful about every single little detail, like those people scraping moss of the sidewalks to keep them clean. They even have amazingly clean toilets, even though this has nothing to do with my entry. Anyways, the video on bunraku was really cool except for the voices the narrators used. That got quite annoying within the first ten minutes. I guess I just have not been exposed to the culture enough to be able to love a voice like that. Maybe that will change soon. You never know. Watching the man make the puppet was amazing. There was so much detail put into everything and the mechanics behind each puppet is crazy. I cannot believe that everything down to the eyelids and each individual finger moves. The puppeteers are good, too. For three people to be able to move in perfect harmony like that takes some serious I don't even know what. They must all be like triplets or something. When the video first showed the performance, I couldn't even see the puppeteers. I actually thought the puppets were the real people until everyone else was like oh dang, are we supposed to be able to see the guys in the back? Maybe I need to get new contacts soon but it looked even cooler once I could see the guys wearing all the black. I didn't really pay attention to the movements of the puppets, but rather the people moving them. There was so much to control and it must have looked pretty real if I couldn't even tell there were people there at first. This art form takes so much patience and skill, I think it's incredible that it has not already died out because if the people of this generation are anything like me, they would not be able to slowly carve out a mask like that or cooperate well enough with two other people to create such a fluid motion with one single puppet. But I guess there are amazing people like that out there and I'm very happy that they are out there.