Part of the appeal of puppets and marionettes is the contrast of scale they present to the real world.  They usually inhabit a smaller version of our world, and are smaller versions of ourselves — but sometimes they inhabit a larger one.  Very large puppets, however, generally represent creatures who are “naturally” large, imaginatively speaking — like the dragons in Chinese street parades.  Colossal representations of humans occur more often in sculpture, like the Statue Of Liberty, for example.

The colossal marionettes picture here, creations of the French Royal de Luxe street theater company, offer a delightfully witty inversion of the usual inversion.  Marionettes, customarily reduced versions of ourselves, here reduce humans to the proportions of marionettes, or even toy soldiers.

I find them unspeakably wonderful.

These photographs, from the Boston Globe's Big Picture site, record a performance at a celebration in Berlin marking the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  The deep-sea diver and the little girl moved towards  each other across the city for a reunion, which offered another inversion — the colossal girl became a little girl again.