Animated Thoughts: No Dungeons, just Dragons!

Well the Sloan Museum of Discovery over in Flint had an exhibit that I just couldn't miss: "The Lost World of Dragons!" As I walked from display to display, I quickly realized that twelve year-old me would've been jumping out of his skin with excitement at seeing dragons and learning about them.

Fifty(ish) me was initially geeked about the animatronics. And then I saw how much the curators wanted the public to engage with this exhibit. The displays were very well constructed and geared for interactivity--lots of buttons and levers and video screens and hidden lights and sounds. But they also had taken a couple pages right out of Lotte Reiniger's book "Shadow Theaters and Shadow Films". Stationed within the displays was a station where you could film your own stop-motion video with dragons in Lotte's silhouette animation style.

Two animation workstations, one on each side

Multi-jointed winged dragon model

Additionally, there was a backlit stage with simple dragon puppets where you could put on a traditional shadow theater play.

There were also some other highly interactive displays, like a puppet show stage complete with simple sound-effects and puppets as well as a virtual-reality headset with this dragon rider game. There was also a station at the entrance where you could pick up a card and watch a video explaining the exhibit and the "Dragon Challenge" game. At various displays, there were symbols to find and copy to your card. At the end, you'd enter them into a display and receive a prize after watching a closing video.

The Dragon Challenge game

They did a really good job on the historical/educational information, not just with the info presented, but how they organized it regionally with dragons from Asia, the Mediterranean, Mesoamerica, and various parts of Europe.

Rating all the museum exhibits I've ever been to, this is definitely number two on that list.(1) It's highly interactive and each station has a lot of documentation with tons of historical information. There are puzzles to solve, artwork to enjoy, and lots and lots of giant dragons! 

It'll be around until September 13th, if you have a kid, or are a kid at heart yourself, I cannot recommend this exhibit highly enough.

* * *

(1) Number one: the Musee d'Orsay's impressionist art collection, Number three: the 'Watch Me Move' animation exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Art.