B efore he became the world’s most famous puppeteer – the man responsible for The Muppets and Big Bird; and turning David Bowie into the Goblin King in Labyrinth – Jim Henson was an experimental film-maker. In his Oscar-nominated 1965 short, Time Piece, Henson stars as a man transcending time and space, the percussive beats of ticking clocks, heartbeats and other machinery creating the rhythms for the film’s montage. In a film that takes cues from Georges Méliès and Dziga Vertov, Henson goes from playing hospital patient to Tarzan to George Washington.

He was a man who could seemingly be anyone, and do anything, much like Henson himself. Alien? Mission: Impossible? Toy Story? What is the greatest movie franchise ever? Read more Short films like Time Piece and Idea Man – an animation in which a small idea multiplies exponentially into something bigger – cast a long shadow over Henson’s career and Ron Howard’s affectionate biography on the late children’s television creator. Howard cribs their mischievous rhythms and aesthetics in his documentary, Jim Henson Idea Man, which digs through archival footage, features new talking head interviews with family and collaborators like Frank Oz and Jennifer Connelly and nostalgically highlights those moments that bring out the kid in all of us.

Those shorts are also instrumental to the point Howard’s film makes: that Henson was always experimenting, in film and television, pushing the form and formats to see what i.