The Gelflings were a slight, elfin race hunted to extinction by the Skeksis. The Skeksis feared a prophecy stating that a Gelfling would destroy them, so they embarked on a campaign to wipe them out. Believing they have solved the problem of their imminent destruction, they have now settled into a life of luxury and decadence, enslaving or destroying any creature that might oppose them. Unfortunately, they hadn’t counted on Jen, who believes he is the last of the Gelflings, and has been raised by the gentle Mystics, or urRu in a valley quite distant (but still in walking distance) from the Skeksis’s ancient fortress…
At this point in his career, after more than a decade working on Sesame Street, several hit seasons of The Muppet Show, as well as a couple of popular movies using those characters, Jim Henson had a sort of Midas Touch when it came to wholesome, slightly offbeat puppet entertainment. Jen’s story, The Dark Crystal (1982) should have been another box office triumph for Jim Henson.
Following this he went on to produce more Muppet movies, Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, Labyrinth, and lent his expertise through Henson Studios to countless other projects before his untimely death in 1990.
(It’s important to note that Henson did have his name on all this work but also shared the credit with a hardworking group of other puppeteers of whom he was merely the coordinator as well as a colleague.)
The Dark Crystal, like all of these other entertainments, was a passion project.
Henson wrote an original treatment, entitled “The Crystal”, while snowed in at a hotel. He based some of the imagery for the story on a short-lived series of sketches he worked on for Saturday Night Live called “The Land Of Gorch” which featured obnoxious puppets who were the antithesis of the Muppets he was becoming more famous for. Mixing these characters with some concepts inspired by illustrations for the poetry of Lewis Carroll, he came up with a story and some ideas that would be refined and rewritten several times to what we are more familiar with as The Dark Crystal.
The story is a pretty simple quest tale, but it’s the detailed world that surrounds the quest that makes it so fascinating to me.
As usual, we’ll get the flaws of the story out of the way first.
The first is that I mentioned the small distance between the Skeksis and urRu’s bases of operations. After Jen departs the valley where he has lived his whole life, the urRu gather their belongings up and follow after him, but a bit more slowly. They reach the Skeksis castle at roughly the same time he does. I just can’t get that Jen has lived so close to his mortal enemy without being detected by their spy creatures before now. You can go into details like mutual respect for each other’s territory or some kind of magical defence but there’s a proper logic issue there, I think.
Which is only compounded when Jen meets Kira, another Gelfling who also lives within a reasonable distance of the Skeksis. Raised by the podlings, a race of simple farmers who are frequently preyed upon by the Skeksis, Kira has avoided detection all her life, although she has been trained a little more effectively in camouflage and defence than Jen has. She also has a cute/irritating pet sidekick (imagine a cross between a Tribble and a Dobermann) who comes to play a minor part in the story’s conclusion
There’s also the issue that the world is insanely detailed and created but we don’t know who most of the Skeksis and urRu are. Many of them are known only by their occupations but they aren’t even name-checked in the dialogue to make telling them apart easier for the audience. This is a problem dealt with quite prosaically in A. C. H. Smith’s novelisation by virtue of speech tags and narrative points-of-view, but if you are watching this as a movie, it is hard to keep track of many of the major players.
But it’s such a gorgeous-looking film that you might not even care that much.
It’s entirely populated by muppets and puppets – unlike Labyrinth, there are no human actors involved at all beyond voices. It’s something that polarised audiences at the time and probably affected the box office take of the film. Despite the more recent success of James Cameron’s Avatar series, we don’t normally like our movies to be too alien, needing some sort of human or earthly context to anchor our expectations upon. Jen and Kira (operated by Jim Henson and Kathryn Muller, voiced by Stephen Garlick and Lisa Maxwell) are humanoid, but very definitely not human: ‘gelfling’ suggests the Tolkienesque roots of their race. Conversely, the Skeksis and urRu are delightfully monstrous, from their not dissimilar heads and snouts right down to their multiple arms. The Garthim, the Skeksis’s crustacean army, look amazing but are probably the most obvious “people-in-suits” creations in the film. The podlings, though, look like they could have stepped out of a peasant village or back-country farm off The Muppet Show. But my favourites are probably the Landstriders, plot conveyances who shorten our protagonists journey by some distance. They are played by stiltwalkers who leap across the screen with abandon and skill while done up in elaborate costumes.
And then there’s Aughra…
Aughra is the most astonishing character in the film. She’s an astronomer, living in an orrery which is one of Jen’s first stops on his quest (and that orrery is one of the most beautifully detailed sets/models in the entire movie). She has one eye which she frequently removes so she can take a closer look at things. Her hair is matted and her clothes are clearly exquisitely tailored but torn and ragged with age and neglect. She knows no fear and is consumed with rage when the Garthim destroy her home and take her prisoner instead of Jen whom they are seeking. But she also has a gentle, compassionate side which comes to the fore when everyone is performing their foretold tasks at the climax of the film. Having her voiced by Billie Whitelaw and operated by Frank Oz in the midst of one his most creative periods is just the icing on the cake.
The world these characters live in is equally well-crafted. Jen’s journey shows a landscape that becomes more hostile and exotic the further from his adopted home he gets: seemingly benign plants become monstrous killing machines, and the very backdrops he walks in front of feature multiple moving parts that entrance the viewer before scaring them to death.
It’s simply one of the most complete fantasy worlds that has ever been put on the screen.
The background material fleshes it out even further. I have mentioned the novelisation which does a decent job of retelling the story as well as adding a lot of detail to flesh out the universe: Smith gives us backstory as well as history and character depth. His version of the tale is more detailed than the script but it also eases the reader more gently into the world.
There’s also The World Of The Dark Crystal, a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book that details a lot of the “history” of the story. Illustrated by Brian Froud with text by Oxford scholar “J. J. Llewellyn” it’s a translation of Aughra’s prophecies and history of the world. It’s gorgeously constructed with some pages accompanied by a bound-in sheet of onion skin that highlights occult diagrams within the pictures. It’s one of the most gorgeous source books to ever accompany a fictional universe ever created.
Over the years The Dark Crystal languished as a weirdly-remembered cult film until about a decade ago when a series of novels and comics were released telling further stories in that world. These were followed by a Netflix series (The Dark crystal: Age Of Resistance) about the fall of the Gelflings and the rise of the Skeksis. While all of these achieved a measure of success and have their fans, they have only elevated the original movie into more general awareness rather than expand the fanbase. Which is a shame because it is a world that rewards closer examination.
I saw The Dark Crystal on its initial cinematic release. I was instantly smitten by the entirety of it. While I appreciated the depth of the universe I had been plunged into, I also knew that the pacing and milieu would be an anathema to some other viewers.
Because I was not the sort of person who could afford to go to the movies to watch a film multiple times, I did the next best thing: I bought the novelisation of the film and relived the story through that.
For a long time I read and reread it. The story had captivated me. So much so that when I started writing reasonably seriously my fledgling stories were simple retellings of Jen and Kira’s adventures with (not very) different characters and settings. I knew it, and I wasn’t terribly pleased with myself, but it was a story model that had clearly imprinted itself upon me somehow. Fortunately I managed to work it out of my system before I began to achieve the level of obscurity I enjoy today.
When I was able to get a copy on home video, I was initially disappointed: the Suck Fairy hadn’t been by, but my average-sized television and speakers just couldn’t convey the exquisite majesty and detail of the world I remembered; Aughra’s orrery, for example, looked a lot less impressive on a small screen. The pacing was still glacially slow as well. I enjoyed it but my nostalgia had taken a bit of a kicking, despite still being in awe of the entirety of the work that had gone into creating it. When viewed on a larger screen with a better sound system it looks and sounds a lot better because there is always something to look at while you’re waiting for the next set piece.
To be fair, a lot of that pacing does come from the fact that this is a movie made with puppets and people in puppets: it’s the medium at fault, if it is a fault. After all, the story might be slow but the world containing it is a wonderful thing to behold.
You can find out more about The Dark Crystal (and spin-offs) at https://www.darkcrystal.com/
