Much is made these days of how irreversibly wired this generation of iPad-playing, TV-addled little rascals is. So how is it that low-tech, age-old puppetry can still cast an audience of kids so fully under its spell?

This is a question the Vancouver International Children’s Festival will help answer, with two very different takes on the art form headlining its shows. Australia’s Erth Dinosaur Zoo brings in giant, anatomically accurate prehistoric puppets, while Germany’s Matthias Kuchta fashions disarmingly human creatures out of cloth for the show The Frog King.

“They open a certain awareness in the heads of the children,” Kuchta tells the Straight over the phone from his studio in Düsseldorf, speaking of his puppets. “You cannot avoid seeing them: they look at you and they demand a reaction. Even when a puppet looks at an adult in the audience he reacts in a totally different way than if an actor looks at him. If an actor looks at him, he might feel insecure and think, ‘How do I react?’ The audience is much more willing to step into the game with puppets.”

One of the most fascinating things about puppets is that children are so able to believe they are real, autonomous beings—even when they can see the puppeteer. Erth’s towering prehistoric creatures are handmade, operated manually by people on-stage, with a human actually sitting inside the T. Rex–like Australovenator.

“One of the first lines of the show is that they’re not real dinosaurs, but two seconds after that the kids have forgotten that,” says Sam Hickey, a puppeteer, or “dino wrangler” as the cast members like to call themselves, speaking on the phone from a tour stop in Ottawa.

Every child at the show gets the chance to touch one of the dinosaurs, which have been designed with a mix of art and science by Erth, a 24-year-old Aussie company that works with museums and builds everything from lifelike puppets to giant inflatable environments.

“Being able to touch and feel helps kids have a relationship with them. They walk away with the memory of having just touched a dinosaur,” says Hickey, whose show’s creatures also come with amplified sounds. “Kids are so exposed to so many digital things these days, and things that are not tangible are now just the norm for children to see.”

The Frog King’s Kuchta crafts puppets closer to human scale. The artist first researches the story and thinks about the real attributes of the characters—whether it’s a proud, spoiled princess or a stubborn amphibious prince. Then he works with codesigner Mechtild Nienaber, finding photographs of real people (even family members, he admits) who express those attributes and starting to build the faces out of cloth. “They are not pretty; they are not exhibition puppets. They are real: all of the histories of the characters are there in their faces,” Kuchta says.

The other notable aspect of Kuchta’s shows is that, rather than hide behind a black screen, he shows himself clearly to the audience, acting as a narrator and intermediator as he manipulates the puppets by hand. “It’s interactive and that’s important, because I want the children to be not consumed passively but emotionally involved,” Kuchta says. “It’s this way of having contact with the audience that helps the children to understand the problem of the little girl in the show.”

At shows like these, puppets clearly offer experiences you can’t get through a monitor. But Kuchta says there’s a magical, mystical appeal to them as well—one that’s harder to put into words. “Puppets are very old and they were even used in the Stone Age. When they wanted to hunt cattle and deer, they had these little sculptures hoping the gods and ghosts would help them,” he says. “It’s a very archaic language, a simple language, and it opens something in our minds.”

The Vancouver International Children’s Festival runs from Tuesday (May 27) to June 1 on Granville Island.