Jim Henson’s Creature Shop animatronics and visual effects studio, based in Los Angeles, has teamed with Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company to produce life-size puppets for the RSC’s stage adaptation of legendary Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki’s 1988 hand-drawn classic My Neighbour Totoro.The RSC’s most ambitious project to date — even more so than the award-winning theater company’s original productions of musicals Les Miserables and Matilda the Musical — My Neighbour Totoro now has creatives working on it at bases in London, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Los Angeles and Tokyo.Show will feature the score that composer Joe Hisaishi created for the film, plus additional music that wasn’t used in the movie.Set in 1950s Japan, the story follows the adventures of Satsuki and Mei, young sisters who move from Tokyo city to the countryside.
Once there they encounter spirits and awesome creatures. Two furry ones capture their imaginations: a giant fluffy creature known as the Totoro and a gargantuan cat bus that collects willing passengers then soars off into the sky.Special attention is being paid at the Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, part of the Jim Henson Company, to those two mysterious creatures.
Phelim McDermott, co-artistic director of theater company Improbable, is directing the show and has pointedly refused to reveal to Deadline how the cat bus will fly. “It’s theater magic,” is as much as he’ll allow.The puppets being built at Creature Shop are based on designs created by Basil Twist, one of the UK’s most innovative puppeteers.
Mervyn Millar, of Britain’s cutting-edge Significant Object puppet studio — it created puppets for the National Theatre production of War Horse and the RSC’s recent The Magician’s Elephant — will create
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