Puppet Maker Spends 400 Hours Carving Marionette, Child Plays With It for 6 Minutes

Master puppet maker Anton Schnitzel has completed what he describes as 'the finest marionette of my forty-year career' — a 400-hour hand-carved linden wood figure with 32 articulated joints, hand-painted features, silk period costuming, and a nine-string control mechanism — only to watch his seven-year-old granddaughter, Elise, play with it for approximately six minutes before setting it aside in favor of a stick she found in the garden. 'I carved each finger individually,' Schnitzel said, his voice barely above a whisper. 'The knee joints use a mortise and tenon system I developed over a decade. The eyes are hand-blown glass with painted irises that catch the light at specific angles. She said, "This is nice, Opa," and then went outside and found a stick.' The stick, approximately 30 centimeters long and unremarkable in every measurable way, has been named 'Princess Stephanie' by Elise, who has been playing with it continuously for three days. 'Princess Stephanie has a castle, which is a shoe box,' Elise explained. 'She has a horse, which is another stick. And she has a best friend, which is a pinecone. I like her because she's easy to hold and she doesn't have all those strings that get tangled.' Schnitzel acknowledged that the nine-string control mechanism, while technically superior, does require 'a level of manual dexterity and spatial awareness that perhaps a seven-year-old has not yet developed.' 'The marionette is a masterwork,' said fellow puppet maker Louise Bois. 'But a child doesn't want a masterwork. A child wants a stick. This is the fundamental tragedy of our craft: we spend our lives perfecting something, and our audience would rather play with debris.' Schnitzel has placed the marionette in a display case in his workshop. Elise has placed Princess Stephanie under her pillow.