Make a realistic Carl paper bag puppet with the free printable template and enjoy watching the beloved Disney movie Up together as a family!
Do your kids love the Disney Pixar movie Up? Mine sure do. If I am being honest, so do I. No matter how many times I watch it, I always end up bawling after the beginning scenes with Carl and Ellie.
Even though Carl was such a grumpy character at the beginning, he ultimately had a kind soul. Up is both heartwarming, at times sad, and for the most part, exciting and funny. Kids can learn important lessons about life, love, and friendship by watching this movie about adventure and imagination.
Today, I am excited to bring you the Carl paper bag puppet from Up! Your kids can relive the movie with simple, classic paper bag puppets. It is a wonderful way to retell a story, which builds both reading comprehension and fluency!
Below you will find a free template and easy instructions to make your own Up paper bag puppet of Carl. To make them more engaging, show the movie after your puppets are complete. Your kids will love it.
How to Make Carl Paper Bag Puppet (from Up)
Materials:
- Free Carl paper bag puppet template (download form located at the end of this post)
- Colored construction paper or cardstock (white, black, off-white, brown, purple, tan, flesh tone, blue, and gray)
- Brown paper bag
- Glue stick
- Scissors
Instructions:
Prepare the Carl Paper Bag Puppet Template
Download the Carl paper bag puppet template. Cut out all the template patterns and trace them onto construction paper or cardstock. The template patterns are labeled with what the pattern is and what color paper to trace them onto.
After you trace all the patterns onto the colored paper, cut all of them out carefully with scissors. Cut an additional two small circles and glue them onto the black eye cutouts to make the eyes more realistic.
** Note: We used a lot of different colored papers for this Disney UP craft because we want to make Carl as authentic as possible. If you don’t have all the different colors at home, feel free to substitute as you please. Another option is to print everything on white paper and then use markers to color in the patterns instead of tracing them on colored paper.
Assemble the Template Cutouts
There are many steps to assembling Carl’s face:
- Glue the black eye cutouts onto the blue eye cutouts, and then the blue eye cutouts to the white eye cutouts (scleras).
- Stick the completed eyes on the face cutout.
- Next, glue the smaller undereye bags on top of the bigger undereye bags. Note that we did use a darker tan for the bigge undereye bags to give Carl’s skin more depth.
- Glue the undereye bags under the white eye cutouts.
- Glue the white eyebrows above the eyes, leaving a small gap in between the eyebrows and the eyes.
- Glue the white hair cutout at the top of the face cutout.
- Glue Carl’s eyeglasses on his face, with the top rim of the glasses between the eyebrows and the eyes. The black glasses should also overlap parts of the hair cutout.
- Glue Carl’s nose on top of the eyeglasses, right under the bridge.
- Glue the ear cutouts on both sides of the face cutout. Make sure to position the ear cutouts so that they look like the temples of the glasses would be sittin on top of the ears.
For Carl’s body, glue the off-white shirt cutout onto the large part of the brown paper bag. Then stick the gray pants at the bottom of the shirt cutout, and the brown belt at the top of the pants. Place the off-white shirt stripe vertically in the center of the shirt cutout and glue it in place.
Next, we are going to put the finishing touches on Carl’s outfit.
For the belt buckle, you would want to layer the gray cutout on the bottom, then the brown cutout, and finally the small gray rectangle on top. Use a glue stick to secure the belt buckle to the belt.
Glue the brown blazer cutouts to both sides of the brown paper bag. Then glue the blazer collars and the pockets on the blazer cutouts.
For the pin-back button, there are a few steps involved. For the pin portion of the badge, glue the brown pin cutout on top of the gray pin cutout. Separately, glue the white pin cutouts on top of the purple pin cutouts so that it looks like a “no” sign. Then glue the purple cutout to the pin portion, but only slightly overlapping so that it looks like the gray pin is holding the purple button.
Glue the completed badge and black tie to the blazer and shirt, respectively.
Finally, glue Carl’s head cutout to the bottom flap of the paper bag. You are done making Carl’s paper bag puppet!
I hope the steps listed above are not too difficult to follow. I know there are a lot of template patterns, but look how great Carl looks once you put him together. Totally worth the time and effort!
If you want to get fancy, blow up some helium balloons and attach them to the back of the paper bag. Just make sure you use something to weigh the paper bag down so that Carl doesn’t fly away!
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