Whenever Guillermo del Toro appears at screenings of his and Mark Gustafson’s stop-motion film “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” he usually insists that the film was not made for children. And whenever he says that, there are invariably children in the audience.
That’s what happens when you have an animated movie based on an old story that already served as the basis for a famous Disney animated movie: it comes in with the assumption that it’s a kids’ movie. But while del Toro’s “Pinocchio” includes a harrowing death early in the film and turns the main character’s quest to become a “real boy” into one that involves more confrontations with death and loss, the winning director Oscar is fine with kids coming to see his movie, as long as their parents are willing to talk to them about it.
“Listen, that’s the crux of animation,” del Toro told TheWrap. “That is something that animation has to claim for itself: the right to be a medium and not a genre.
“That is a conversation. The second conversation is that there is absolutely nothing in this film that is unacceptable for audiences to view in familiar settings. It’s a movie that’s going to raise questions, but there’s no more darkness in this movie than there is in classic Disney movies. You need darkness to make light.”
The idea, he said, was to make a movie that could be in his filmography alongside movies like “The Devil’s Backbone” and the Oscar-winning “Pan’s Labyrinth,” movies that had kids in the lead but weren’t kid stuff. no way. it means.
“In the most susceptible cases, dialogue will be needed to talk about life and death and so on,” he said. “But I am extremely happy to say that the many times we have seen it with an audience, the children seem to react with great curiosity and love. I think this movie is full of truth, love and forgiveness. There are more dangerous things in shampoo ads than in this movie.” The river. “We speak our truth and show a beautiful story.”
Its co-director Mark Gustafson, a stop-motion veteran whose other works include “Claymation Easter” and “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” with Wes Anderson, said the darker, more serious side of this version was shielded by del Toro’s influence. . with Netflix, which endorsed and released the film. “When you have someone like Guillermo guarding the doors, you feel very comfortable and confident that you won’t have to respond to a focus group,” Gustafson said. “If we feel like this is what’s best for the movie, that’s what we’ll do. We didn’t do anything for free, but we were able to go into those darker areas with the confidence that we were also creating these other light areas.
“Everything was going to live together. In a way, there’s (Warner Bros. animator) Tex Avery in this movie, but there are also themes of sadness and loss. And I think they’re stronger because they’re next to a poop puppet that dances.”
A longer interview with Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gufstason on Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” will appear in the awards preview issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
