We are puppet people.

And we couldn't find what we were looking for — so we built it.

PuppetHunt.tv was born out of a simple frustration: if you love puppets on screen, there is no place to find them. No database, no catalogue, no map of the territory. Puppet content is scattered across streaming platforms, film archives, national broadcasters, YouTube channels and museum collections — invisible to search engines, unknown to each other, and almost impossible to discover unless you already know where to look.

We decided to change that.

Who we are

We are Sinilos Puppet Studio — a Spanish company with more than 25 years of professional work creating, building and performing puppets for theatre, television, cinema and advertising. Our television and film work includes Los Lunnis — including its feature film —, Los Algos (Cuatro) and Aprendemos en Clan (RTVE), as well as advising on and performing puppets for national advertising campaigns.

We are not academics studying puppetry. We are practitioners who have spent decades on stage and on set — and who happen to believe that puppets are one of the most powerful storytelling tools ever invented.

Why PuppetHunt exists

Puppet content has a visibility problem. A Bunraku master's performance from 1970 sits in a Japanese archive, a Jim Henson experiment lives on Internet Archive, a French guignol episode is buried in a broadcaster's catalogue — and none of them talk to each other. The craft is ancient and alive, but its audiovisual record is fragmented.

PuppetHunt is an attempt to federate that record. We harvest data from public databases, film archives, national broadcasters and open collections around the world — then curate, cross-reference and publish it in a single searchable catalogue. Every work is scored for puppet relevance and reviewed by a human before it appears here.

The catalogue currently contains 302 human-verified works — each one reviewed and validated by our editorial team. Behind them, another 401 approved works are queued for manual verification, drawn from a total harvest of over 7465 records spanning more than a century of production.

PuppetHunt is a living project — and it will never be finished. As long as puppets appear on screens, we will keep looking for them. New productions, rediscovered archives, overlooked classics: the work is permanent.

What counts as a puppet?

Marionettes, hand puppets, rod puppets, finger puppets, muppet-style foam puppets, ventriloquist figures, bunraku, wayang, guignol, shadow puppets, sock puppets, animatronics, water puppets and object theatre. We do not include conventional 2D animation, CGI, anime, claymation or stop-motion.

The rule is simple: the puppet must be real, and real puppeteers must bring it to life. A physical object, built and performed by human hands. Technology is welcome — digital effects, virtual sets, motion capture rigs, compositing — as long as there is a real puppet, performed by real puppeteers, at the centre of it. What we do not include is AI-generated or AI-simulated puppetry: content where the puppet itself is a synthetic construct with no physical existence. The craft matters. The object matters.

A note on curation, quality, and values

We aim to map the entire audiovisual territory of puppetry. Because of its cultural and historical value, we include as much content as possible. However, inclusion in PuppetHunt does not equal endorsement. The presence of a work in our catalogue does not mean we agree with the messages it promotes, nor does it mean we consider the manipulation to be good or bad. We list both masterpieces and flawed works because they all belong to the global record of the craft — provided they meet a minimum standard of quality to be included.

Our boundaries are strict: we will not include content that falls below this basic threshold, violates fundamental human values, or disrespects the puppet, the craft, and the professionals behind it.

How it works

Data is harvested automatically from more than 18 public sources — Wikidata, TMDb, Internet Archive, Europeana, BBC, AAPB, Japan Search, UNESCO ICH and others. Each work is then scored algorithmically for puppet relevance and reviewed by a human curator before appearing in the public catalogue. Descriptions are enriched with AI assistance and validated manually.

We are a catalogue, not a streaming platform. We aggregate metadata and link out to wherever we found each work — a broadcaster, an archive, a streaming platform, or a video hosted on YouTube. We try to link to the most official source available, but that is not always possible: a great many trailers and clips online were uploaded by anonymous fans or third-party channels, not by the rights holder, and in those cases we link to the best copy we could find, not necessarily an official one. Streaming availability also varies by country and changes constantly, so a link that works today may not work everywhere or forever.

We do not host or store any of the content listed here — not a single video in our catalogue lives on our servers. PuppetHunt is an index: we find puppetry published across the internet and link you to where we found it. If you are a rights holder and would prefer that a work not appear here, or that a link be corrected or removed, write to us at hello@puppethunt.tv and we will take care of it.

Support the project

PuppetHunt is independent and self-funded — no ads. Hosting, data enrichment and the hours spent curating every single entry come entirely out of pocket. Right now we can accept one-time donations and one-off sponsorships to help cover those costs.

There is no paywall and no subscription today. We are considering a future membership for patrons who want to support the project on a monthly basis, with public recognition and a few dedicated tools inside the database for them — but that does not exist yet, and using the catalogue will always remain free.

If your company or organisation wants to help keep it going, we offer sponsorship with a visible mention on the site as a collaborator. Get in touch at hello@puppethunt.tv.

A catalogue for puppet fans everywhere

Puppetry belongs to cultures all over the world, and its fans do too. PuppetHunt is available in Spanish, English, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese, French, German, Simplified Chinese and Catalan so that more people can discover these works in their own language. We want to keep expanding carefully, with translations reviewed by people who understand both the language and the craft.

Español, English, Português, 日本語, Français, Deutsch, 简体中文, Català

Every visit, something different

The home page never shows the same catalogue twice. Works are served in a different order on every visit — so there is always something to discover, even if you have been here before. Puppet content is deep enough to keep surprising you.

If you want the best finds delivered to you, subscribe to the weekly newsletter. Every Friday we pick a few works from the catalogue — things you almost certainly didn't know existed — with whatever viewing information we have for each one. Availability varies a lot by country, so we can't promise a way to watch every pick, but we point you in the right direction.

Puppet films, series and oddities you didn't know existed — every Friday.

Attributions

PuppetHunt aggregates data from the following public sources and open databases:

Descriptions are enriched with the assistance of Google Gemini AI and validated manually by our editorial team.

Browse by puppet technique

Moving-mouth Puppets (131), Rod Puppets (47), Body Puppets (28), Marionettes (23), Animatronics (22), Glove Puppets (18), Ventriloquist Figures (16), Bunraku-style Technique (3), Shadow Puppets (2), Finger Puppets (1)

Browse by collection

31 Minutos (5), Aprendemos En Clan (2), Augsburger Puppenkiste (2), Fraggle Rock (5), Gerry Anderson (2), Helpsters (2), Jeff Dunham (9), Lunnis (7), Muñecos Animados | Román y Cía (15), Puppet Master (7), Sesame Street (15), Sinilos Puppet Studio (6), The Dark Crystal (3), The Jim Henson Company (60), The Muppets (30)

← Back to catalogue