Giant Inflatable French Puppets Take Over Berlin (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

The French are known for their excellent food, great wine and wonderful art, but one thing the French do hands down better than anyone is make giant inflatable puppets.

Yep, their puppets are way more sophisticated than the giant SpongeBob SquarePants inflatables seen during the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Their puppets seem to magically move and take on a life of their own.

And nowhere was the French supremacy in the field of large inflatable more apparent than on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm, the city's main boulevard, where locals recently celebrated the street's 125th anniversary with a performance by Les Plasticiens Volants, a French troupe of puppeteers who are world famous for large-scale extravaganzas that tell stories using giant puppets filled with helium and air and controlled by ropes.

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The troupe, which has been around since 1976, showed off its latest longform piece, "Big Bang," which debuted last month in Libourne, France, and tells the story of the universe's creation -- without dialogue, just music and, yes, those giant inflatable puppets.

Artistic director Marc Bureau says the piece was three years in the making, in part, because those giant inflatable puppets take a long time to build.

"The advantage and the biggest challenge is building a marionette without a solid and fixed structure," Bureau told the German network Deautsche Welle. "They have to move in a way that makes them seem alive. We want the audience and their imagination to believe they can bend and turn their heads."

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