“Give this band a name!!” the Instagram caption read. The video showed four bright pink and orange shrimp, antennae seeming to wave as they spun around and bobbed up-and-down to a chucklesome version of the “Star Wars” cantina song. One played a melodica; another, a banjo; a hand can be seen cranking the wooden gears that make the figures dance.
The shrimp are the work of Amedeo Capelli, a self-taught carpenter and maker of hand-operated automatons, or moving devices. He lives in Varese, Italy, north of Milan.
Mr. Capelli has been making his creations in his garage-cum-workshop at home for the past two years and selling via his Etsy shop and social media platforms. The business goes by the name Stoccafisso Design, or stockfish, one of the terms Italians use for cod (the first objects he sold were papier-mâché fish).
“When I started,” said Mr. Capelli, 31, in a recent video interview, it didn’t seem likely that this kind of work could “become my only job.”
Ten years ago Mr. Capelli briefly produced the packaging for beer bottles and crafted some bottle openers and beer tap handles. Then he made furniture, and had a brief stint in the cosplay industry, producing costumes, armor and swords. But, he said, he really didn’t want to do any of that as a career.
In 2020, he opened his online shop, but began stocking it two years later, about the time he consistently began using social media to promote his work. He now releases a short video almost every week: a mouse as a sword-carrying pirate or a marching Roman soldier, an orchestra of skeletons, and frogs on unicycles — that sort of thing.
At last count, the shrimp band had more than three million likes (and name suggestions for the merry marine quartet included “Red Hot Krilly Peppers,” “Shrimp Bizkit” and “Prawn Jovi”).
As for how he came up with the shrimp band, “I wake up with the idea and do it in the afternoon,” Mr. Capelli said of the set, priced at 470 euros ($510). He estimated that, in his two years of solo work, he has made about 500 pieces and sold most of them. His prices generally range from about €250 to €1,000, although a few complex constructions are much more. The Macabra Orchestra (or Macabre), the skeleton group, for example, is from €7,000.
Mr. Capelli said he started experimenting with woodcarving and carpentry as a child, and was inspired by Trentino, a region in northern Italy known for its carpentry workshops, which he had visited several times. The inspirations for his characters, he added, have come from nature, animals and traditional folklore as well as films, video games and books.
To begin, “usually I do a little sketch,” he said, though he prefers to “work directly on the wood.” He generally starts with the mechanism, which is made of oak because it is durable. The base and the characters are made of fir because it is soft and easy to cut. The figures are mounted on thin metal rods that are then threaded through holes drilled in the base and attached to the gear mechanism. The gears are turned with a knob that protrudes from one side of the piece, in much the same kind of action as playing with a jack-in-the-box.
Mr. Capelli uses a wide range of electrical and manual tools, and a variety of brushes to apply water-based acrylic paint to the pieces.
Asked later how he would characterize the look of his shrimp and other figures, he replied in an email: “I wouldn’t be able to correctly identify my art style, or at least give a correct name, what it comes closest to is illustration, or animation, because the characters I create are very simplified, caricatural, sometimes anthropomorphized.”
Typically, Mr. Capelli said, he will work on multiple pieces at a time, and can complete something like a mouse in a day. The skeleton orchestra, however, took a month.
Determining the action of the finished piece, he said, is the most important part of the process. “I prefer to do very simple movements,” which he pointed out “needed to be realistic in the repetition.”
Two mice performing a toast, for example, would not make sense, he said, because “after the toast, probably the mice want to drink.” Actions that do make sense, as performed by his current characters, include hair seeming to blow in the wind, a boat bobbing on the waves, and a kite flying high.
Such charming gestures are what William Newton, a curator at the Young V&A museum in London (formerly the Museum of Childhood), describes as “easy magic.”
“Automata like that,” he said, “they’ve always been sort of designed to delight people and for entertainment.” About 100 or 150 years ago, he noted, playing with an automaton would be a form of after-dinner entertainment.
Part of the thrill, he said, is being able to see how a piece works: “You can see the cause and effect.”
Today automatons are generally thought of as mechanized pieces, but versions created in ancient Greece were powered by water and air and there have been many other iterations over the centuries.
Automatons are no longer commonplace, but there still are some specialists producing quality versions, particularly in the watch industry. Van Cleef & Arpels’s table clock, called Rêveries de Berylline, has a flower that opens its petals to reveal a bird. And there are wristwatch versions, like Jaquet Droz’s The Dragon, which has the winged serpent breathe fire and flick its tail.
Yet pieces that are more like toys have great appeal, according to Brielle Saggese, an insight strategist at WGSN, a trend forecast agency. “Since the pandemic,” she wrote in an email, “adult purchases of toys, games and crafts have been steadily climbing because nurturing a sense of play suddenly became more valuable.”
She wrote that Mr. Capelli’s designs struck “a balance between a sense of childlike play and an adult’s appreciation for the maker’s craft and talent.”
“The best part of my work,” Mr. Capelli said, “is to see a piece of wood that comes to life.”
