Giramundo’s Galaxy of Stars

I was lucky enough recently to catch a major retrospective of the work of Giramundo in the Palacio das Artes in Belo Horizonte. Founded in 1970 by the artists Álvaro Apocalypse, Tereza Veloso and Madu, the collective has produced over forty theatrical shows starring their troupe of handcrafted fantastical characters. Cartoons, puppetry and stop frame animation is central to the childhood memory, and I can still remember as if it was yesterday Ray Harryhausen’s spellbinding monsters and skeletal warriors in Jason and the Argonauts (1963). The sheer creativity and craft of Giramundo’s cast of exotic humans and creatures, is similarly stunning. Drawing on folklore, religious ritual, and satire the characters range from ghostly cadavers to afro-Brazilian field workers, pig faced men and women, mysterious deities, tortured writers, and playful human-animal hybrids. Lyrical, magical and in some cases grotesque, the work reminded me of the extraordinary animated world of the likes of Jiří Trnka, the Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmajer, master puppeteers and stop frame filmmakers who similarly mixed folklore, myth, and all manner of allegorical tropes to create scenes that  are often unsettling. As Giramundo said in an interview, there is no mystery as to why so many of the characters have peculiar traits, deformed features, or alien qualities, they are simply narrative distillations of the imperfections of human nature.