Puppet animation has multiple attributes such as video narrative, physical material, puppetry technology and cultural memory, and its cross-media communication cannot only rely on the distribution of the original movie, short video clips or social platform forwarding. Aiming at the problems of dispersed narrative units, difficult transformation of craft information, insufficient explanation of cultural motifs, and difficult return of feedback from platforms in existing communication practices, this paper builds a sample library of puppet animation narratives under the framework of digital humanities, and organizes the text of the work, the platform dissemination materials, the production process, the cultural motifs, and the public commentaries into a heterogeneous map of the narrative media. The study sets the indicators of narrative retention, media coupling, interaction intensity, cross-media transformation rate and interpretation quality, and codes and models 68 puppet animation works, 3286 platform communication materials and 42615 public comments. The results show that the cultural knowledge visualization strategy has the highest composite score of 0.724; the interaction intensity of the material and craft subtexts reaches 15.6 per 1,000 exposures; and the cross-media conversion rate of audience participatory co-creation reaches 12.3%. The ablation results showed that the composite score decreased by 12.8% after removing the material-craft label, therefore this shows that the explanation on material attribute of puppet animation is one key variable in cross-media communication. This research further puts forward strategies for the work assignment among the primary film, short video, social media, digital archive, exhibition place, and VR/AR experience, providing a reusable methodological path for the digital dissemination of puppet animation, the display of non-heritage, and the operation of cultural content.
