The digital avatar has evolved from a marginal, pixelated figure in gaming to a hyper-real protagonist at the centre of visual culture. Animated through motion capture and rendered in game engines, avatars now occupy a continuum that stretches from ancient puppetry and animist ritual to contemporary performance art and capitalist spectacle. The rise of photorealistic 3D avatars can be situated within a broader historical lineage of performing objects, from traditional puppetry and mask practices to experimental uses of emerging media technologies. In recent years, contemporary artists have explored avatars as both instruments of control and spaces of resistance, using them to question realism, labour, and embodiment in digital environments. While corporate platforms promise seamless replication of human affect, many creative practitioners deliberately highlight glitches, fragility, and exhaustion as strategies to disrupt cultural assumptions about bodies, productivity, and capital. By reading avatars through the lenses of animism, the uncanny, and performance theory, it becomes clear that digital puppetry is not only a technological phenomenon but also a cultural and philosophical return of repressed animistic traditions, refracted through planetary infrastructures of computation, extraction, and media circulation.