I am here today to speak of Rodents of an Unusual Size. No, not the ones that the hero battles in the Swamp in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, but rather the far more adorable ones that came in for review.
There are two new additions to the puppet collection here, Portsmouth and Kittery. They are in fact two very large grey mice that are among the latest releases from the fine folks at Folkmanis.
i should note that there’ve not been a lot of mice reviewed here — no jokes please about the incompatibility of cats and mice! — until Folkmanis sent along these two. Oh, there’s The Mouse in the Shoe here from Folkmanis which Maria Nutick said is ‘completely adorable. Five inches long, this very cute finger puppet is perfect for children. The little white mouse disappears entirely inside the shoe; the puppet is operated through a finger hole in the sole of the shoe.’ That mouse is quite cute — He’s adoring Tatar’s The Annotated Fairy Tales. But these are indeed Rodents of an Unusual Size.
They stand, or rather sit, an impressive eighteen inches or so from the tips of their tails to their nicely made ears. They have rather expressive brown eyes, which give them quite a bit of character, and each mouse has a sparkling tweed vest with a teal blue lining closed with a a cheese wedge button (!) and a pocket watch sewn on the vest. (The latter is why Portsmouth is now wearing a Portsmouth First Night button.) Even their tails are cute. Certainly from a storyteller’s perspective, they’d be great as part of, say, a telling of ‘The Pied Piper Hamlin’. And I must say that they’d make lovely mice to, errr, guard the cheese in the kitchen.
But the best aspect of them is that they don’t have the typically stiff ‘wire brush’ whiskers so many of their ilk have. I was impressed enough by this innovation that I asked Elaine Kollias of Folkmanis why this was so. Here’s her answer:
Those whiskers are ‘paper whiskers’ and were done on purpose. I think the idea is that the normal mono-filament whiskers are too plastic and hard and that the whimsy in this design would be better enhanced by the whimsical whiskers. You can get them to style and stay if you use your fingernails to straighten them and then curl them by using your nails like you would in curling ribbon.
Indeed that was just what I did do after getting this message from her — the result was that they really are natural looking whiskers!
It is certainly one of the better puppets I’ve seen!
[...] Folkmanis puppet: Mouse with a Vest [...]