This story about “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” appeared for the first time in a special animation section in the Award Preview Number from TheWrap Awards Magazine.
It should come as no surprise that Guillermo del Toro has made an animated film using the stop-motion technique. The real surprise should be that it took him until 2022 to make Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio,” because the filmmaker has been fascinated with the art form to the point where he started his own little stop-motion company as a teenager in the City. from Mexico. Since then, he has been making acclaimed movies like “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “Nightmare Alley” and the Oscar-winning “The Shape of Water,” while dreaming of making his own animated feature.
And for many of those years, he also had a pretty good idea of what story he wanted to tell. “I saw (Disney’s) ‘Pinocchio’ as a very young child, and I loved it because I found it captured how terrifying childhood seemed to me,” she said. “But I didn’t quite understand why he needed to be an obedient child to be loved. And then when I was 20 years old, I started to think that it would be cool to pit him against a totalitarian government. Those were kind of floating ideas.”
Floating ideas took firmer shape when he saw illustrator Gris Grimly’s take on the character and enlisted stop-motion veteran Mark Gustafson (“The Fantastic Mr. Fox”) to co-direct. For the second incarnation of the script, del Toro had introduced dialogue between Pinocchio and Death, something he felt linked the film to the trials of another young lead.
“I thought we needed something that would be a threshold for Pinocchio, something that would make him a real boy not physically but spiritually,” he said. “The main character in ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ had tests that were not physical tests, but they changed it and measured his soul.”
In making the Netflix film, del Toro was comfortable with the language of stop-motion animation, but was unfamiliar with programming a “Pinocchio”-sized film. Gustafson set up a facility in Portland, Oregon with the animation company ShadowMachine. And then COVID hit.
“The film stopped for a moment and then it just blew up,” Gustafson said. “It went out to the houses of these artists all over the city: people continued to work at home using their own tools, sculpting, painting and building accessories.” They eventually returned to the set under strict pandemic regulations, ending after del Toro said it was more than 960 days of shooting.
“So many puppets,” Gustafson said. “So many games.”
They worked to maintain the tone of the film, to sustain what del Toro called “the religious aspects, the life and death discussions, the father-son story, the anti-fascist elements.” They also told the animators to not just move the puppets, but throw in little moments, little looks, and reactions along the way.
“We wanted to see the characters process information and not just use broad gestures to sell an idea,” Gustafson said.
Del Toro added: “We kept saying: ‘We don’t want movement, we want emotion.’ Anyone can make the puppet go from here to there, but we want to know what the puppet is thinking.”
The puppets often seemed to be thinking about death, a theme that looms large in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” from the extended opening sequence, in which the woodcarver Geppetto raises a son and then loses it in a accidental bombing during World War I. When asked if it was important to start the film with the specter of death, del Toro immediately posed the question again.
“It was always important to start with the spectrum of life,” he said. “It was important to say, ‘This is what we get when we’re here and what we lose if we don’t take advantage of it.’ father who can’t bear the loss of a child and we end up with a son who can’t bear the loss of a father. That’s a very careful composition that took many years to animate. And it was important to say, ‘Life is such a gift. beautiful, and then what happens happens. And then we’re done.’”
Read more of the awards preview here.
