`PINOCCHIO' PUPPETS JOIN TECHNOLOGY AND HEART.

Byline: Rita Reif The New York Times

The British designer Jamie Courtier was frantic by the time the sixth of the puppet heads he had created for the new movie ``The Adventures of Pinocchio'' had been rejected by the filmmakers.

``I was desperate when I began sculpting the seventh version.'' he said. ``So I did exactly what I thought was right. A puppet can't be designed by committee. It has to come from one person.''

When it was finished, the head looked nothing like the original conception of the film's director, Steve Barron. ``He wanted it to be blocky, the woodenness emphatic,'' Courtier said. ``It finally became an elfin face. The eyes are too large. That's puppetry.''

As the film's project supervisor at Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London, Courtier headed the team of 50 artists and technicians that created the puppets for the movie, which opened late last month. The team produced 12 versions of the puppet in order to show Pinocchio's evolution from a log to the puppet who wants to become a boy. The team also had to accommodate the filmmakers, who needed to make both close-up and distance shots.

Two of the versions are on view at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in ``Puppets and Performing Objects in the 20th Century,'' through Sept. 28.

The Henson team began work on Pinocchio in March 1995. The puppet's body was the easy part. ``I went down to the workshop and knocked out a quick body,'' Courtier said. ``The body was completely spontaneous, and it remained the final choice.''

The head was another matter; it took five weeks to produce an acceptable design. ``While I worked on the face,'' said Courtier, ``the body supported a head that looked like a giant darning egg without any features except a peg for the nose.''

Once the head was completed, the team was left with 10 weeks to build the basic puppet, its animatronic circuitry and its mechanical rigging. Shooting of the movie in the Czech Republic had to begin in July so that the young actor Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who supplies Pinocchio's voice, could be back in Los Angeles where filming was to resume for the television series ``Home Improvement,'' in which he is a cast member.

The face on that head became the model for all 12 Pinocchios, including one that was a stringed marionette. The body of the full-scale puppet, the tallest of the puppets, was also replicated in fiberglass.

The jointed figure stands 38 inches tall and has large articulated hands, bony legs and a facile face that through the use of animatronics can express a range of emotions: eagerness, willfulness, shock and more.

According to Courtier, Barron did not want a beautifully polished Pinocchio, and the puppets the designer came up with could hardly be called polished. They have little chips and chisel marks all over them, and a painted depiction of pine grain is visible on the surface of all the puppets, even those of fiberglass, which have foam-latex heads.

The animatronic works made to fit inside the melon-size heads of the puppets - 18 Chiclet-size motors, a circuit board, wires and linkages - are a marvel of complexity.

``There is a mechanical substructure on which the face skin fits like a glove,'' Courtier said. The skin is sensitive to rain, sun and other irritants. He cited as an example a scene in which Pinocchio gobbles pieces of cake. The icing made of shaving cream penetrated the puppet's ``skin,'' and it fell apart.

Nevertheless, the puppets displayed at the Lincoln Center library look as if they were made of wood. One is clothed in a red cap, coat and breeches and has exquisitely articulated hands and cloglike feet. The other, an undressed version, is knobby-kneed and has a heart carved on its chest. It walks when you press a button.

Operating each puppet in the film required five or six skilled puppeteers. One stood behind the camera and manipulated the face electronically from a console.

Others, while riding a rig, used rods and strings to move the puppet's legs and arms mechanically. These handlers and their equipment were erased during post-production. ``It takes longer to shoot a puppet than a person,'' Courtier said.

The only action that even the animatronic Pinocchio could not perform was extending his nose when he lied. That process involved computer animation and four noses of different lengths, including one that was 16 feet long. Whenever the animated image of the nose stopped growing, it was replaced with one of the four created by the Henson team.

Although he has worked in film for 20 years, six of them with Henson, Courtier nonetheless found the making of Pinocchio a memorable experience.

``I feel rather personally about the puppet,'' he said.

``This has never happened to me in quite the same way before, at least not as powerfully. He tied together all of the things I had learned in this business, technically and artistically. Pinocchio was a marriage of hearts. The performers felt the same about him, and gave of themselves.''

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Photo

Photo: There was one Geppetto (Martin Landau) but 12 differ ent Pinocchio puppets created for use in ``The Adventures of Pinocchio.''