PLOT SUMMARY AND PUPPETRY INFORMATION (excerpt) 

The following is copied from Chapter 7 (pp. 162-191) of the 1993 book (by Christopher Finch) Jim Henson, The Works: The Art, The Magic, The Imagination.

In 1983, Jim Henson began to plan a new fantasy movie, Labyrinth. As with The Dark Crystal, Brian Froud was to be the conceptual designer. But this time, the development process would be somewhat different.

To begin with, Labyrinth would include human characters and take place partly in the evryday world. This was not a case of inventing everything from scratch, even though much of the film would take place in a make-believe setting and involve many animatronic creatures created in the Downshire Hill Creature Shop.

Labyrinth would keep the Creature Shop busy devising everything from talking door knockers to a walking junk pile. It's impossible to come up with a "typical" Labyrinth character, but the kind of complexities involved can be understood by taking the case of Hoggle - a mjor figure in the movie who reluctantly befriends the film's heroine.

On one level, Hoggle was simply an evolution of the "humans with Muppet heads" concept that had begun with 'Hey Cinderella!' Inside the basic Hoggle suit was an actress provided with a concealed view hole and a television monitor that showed her what the camera saw. But Hoggle's enormous head went way beyond anything imagined at the time of 'Hey Cinderella!' This was a remote-controlled, animatronic device requiring several people to operate it, one performing the lips, one the eyes, one the brows, and so on - all supervised by Brian Henson.

Coexisting with Hoggle would be characters like Sir Didymus - a courtly terrier who speaks Elizabethan English and rides a sheepdog named Ambrosius. Other inventions included Ludo (a gentle, lumbering giant with matted red fur), and the manic "fierys," who could cause flames to leap up from the ground and separate theirheads and limbs from their bodies. In fact, Labyrinth would contain the full gamut of puppet styles and animatronic innovations Jim had introduced over the years.

Labyrinth was directed by Jim Henson with all the technical flair he had brought to his early film projects. And while he did not perform any major characters, several Muppet Show and Sesame Street veterans did, including Dave Goelz, Steve Whitmire, and Kevin Clash, along with Brian Henson and Dark Crystal veteran Dave Greenaway.

Labyrinth is a film that combines fairy-tale elements with a story line that at times recalls books like The Wizard of Oz and Through The Looking Glass. The heroine, Sarah, is a somewhat self-absorbed teenager who resents her baby half-brother, Toby. In a reckless moment, she wishes that the King of the Goblins would kidnap the child. Jareth obliges, and Sarah spends the balance of the movie trying to retrieve her sibling by penetrating a maze - the labyrinth of the title - that surrounds Goblin City and Jareth's castle, where Toby is hidden. She is assisted in her quest by Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus, but eventually must confront Jareth on her own and, in doing so, vanquishes her adolescent demons, bringing herself and the baby safely back to the everyday reality of her home.

The pleasures of the tale, however, are in the telling and - as is so often the case in Jim Henson's projects - the tale is essentially visual. In a sense, the labyrinth itself is the film's central character, and it is splendidly realized in all its manifestations. In places it is made up of damp, high walls, from which an exotic form of creeping plant watches with beady eyes. Elsewhere, it is like a topiary maze, such as can be found at Hampton Court Palace and in formal gardens throughout the world. Sometimes, it is just a rocky landscape, or a forest where the path winds back on itself, presenting innumerable confusing intersections. There are doors that open and close by themselves and hidden trapdoors that lead to an infernal bog or - in one case - to a chute lined with talking hands. Finally, inside Jareth's castle, the labyrinth becomes a complicated Escher-like puzzle that dislocates space and time. Always, though, the maze is achieved so convincingly that it seems to draw the heroine onward, and the viewer with her.

Some critics have seen films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth as having little to do with Jim's previous work, and certainly they do represent a departure from his Muppet style. But they were very much the products of the same sensibility that had produced, for example, the Saturday Night Live puppets. if Jim had not tackled fantasy subjects in earnest till the eighties, it was not for lack of interest, but rather because he had been occupied with other things and had not yet attained the technical means of realizing his visions. In fact, the fantasy films were just a beginning for Jim, and he returned to this vein again with the brilliant television series called Jim Henson's The Storyteller, which made its debut not long after Labyrinth's release.

(The following are margin notes which accompanied the photos.)

Trying to describe Labyrinth, Jim Henson asked the rhetorical question, "Is it all a dream, like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz? In my mind it is. But it's all rather ambiguous - dream or reality? Fantasy or fact? It's whatever you like to make it."

One thing he was certain of was that Labyrinth "is about a person at the point of changing from being a child to being a woman. Times of transition are always magic. Twilight is a magic time and dawn is magic - the times during which it's not day and it's not night but something in between. Also the time between sleeping and dreaming. There are a lot of mystical qualities associated related to that, and to me that is what the film is about."

Certainly much of Labyrinth has a dreamlike quality, and its atmosphere also relates to (as Jim pointed out) to the books that the movie's heroine, Sarah, reads: books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. And, as with The Dark Crystal, Jim called on Brian Froud to help imagine the world to be conjured up (drawings top and opposite). Appropriately, Toby - the baby kidnapped by Jareth (David Bowie) - was played in the movie by the son of Brian and Wendy Midener Froud.

Jim Henson and executive producer George Lucas stare intently at a monitor as one of Labyrinth's scenes unfolds (above). In addition to his ability to produce fabulous special effects, Lucas brought his knowledge of story structure to the project.

Labyrinth was chosen as the occasion for a Royal Command Performance, and before the screening, the Princess of Wales was given the opportunity to meet Ludo, one of the movie's most sympathetic characters (left).

With George Lucas as executive producer and Jim Henson as director, it could almost be taken for granted that Labyrinth would feature amazing creatures and astonishing special effects. Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic effects shop was responsible for the many optical effects - camera tricks - such as the matte paintings that were used to extend the mazes built as sets (below) so that they seemed to extend to the horizon (artist's study, above).

Meanwhile craftspeople at Jim Henson's Creature Shop (right) built on the experience that had been gained creating the protagonists of The Dark Crystal. Among other fantastic beings, the new movie called for the construction of a knightly terrier, his sheepdog steed, a host of vicious goblins, a talking junk pile, articulate door knockers, and a giant gate that guarded the goblin king's castle by turning into a monstrous mechanical foe.

"It was at the time of Labyrinth," says Brian Henson, "that the idea of the Creature Shop really became settled in my father's mind. During the making of The Dark Crystal, he began to realize that he had put a remarkable group of people together and wanted to hold it together somehow. With Lyle Conway running it, the Downshire Hill shop had stayed in business by doing work for Dreamchild. [Dreamchild is director Gavin Miller's film about Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.] But it was with Labyrinth, I think, that the Creature Shop really developed into a self-contained entity that would be able to go out and generate its own business."

"The creatures in Labyrinth are the most sophisticated characters we've evr built," Jim said at the time. "We use a lot of remote-controlled radio techniques and teams of puppeteers, who each operate various parts of the characters. I think that some effects we've achieved look so real that people won't even realize we've done anything special."

Two younger members of the Henson family made significant contributions to Labyrinth, both as performers and behind the scenes. Along with Shari Weiser, who inhabited the costume, and a number of assistants, Brian Henson (seen above with Jim) performed Hoggle, one of the film's major puppet characters, and also served as the production's puppet coordinator. Cheryl Henson was one of the puppet-builders who helped design and develop the characters known as Alph and Ralph, and was also a member (below) of the team that performed one of the "fierys" - aggressively hyperactive creatures who were capable of literally losing their heads.

The feathery, bright red fierys - who perform an extraordinary dance to a musical number by David Bowie - are just one example of the kinds of astonishing creatures to be found in Labyrinth. Among others shown on this spread are the goblins (right, above), seen here surrounding baby Toby (Toby Froud), who seems rather to enjoy his captivity in Jareth's castle; Humongous (right, below), an armored, axe-wielding monster who comes alive when two huge metal gates are slammed shut; the Wiseman (opposite, left), a doddering oracle with a bird on his head, performed by Frank Oz with his usual brilliance; and Hoggle (opposite, lower right), a denizen of the maze who at first wants nothing to do with Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), the story's human heroine. Hoggle eventually helps Sarah reach Jareth's castle, where she finally confronts Toby's captor, played by david Bowie, who has previously romanced her in a glittering ballroom scene (opposite, upper right).

Although the creatures in this production relied heavyily on modern technology to bring them to life, the world evoked is one of fairy tale and traditional fantasy. "Puppetry is an ancient tradition that draws heavily on myth and legend," Jim explained at the time, "but I enjoy converting [that tradition] to the worlds of film and television."

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