How Guillermo del Toro Crafted His 15-year Passion Project ‘Pinocchio’ For A Modern Audience
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ombining Guillermo del Toro’s unique voice with the endless possibilities of animation was always going to yield an intriguing outcome, but when the story is a reinvention of the classic tale of Pinocchio and features the voices of Ewan McGregor, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz and more, it’s a recipe for audiences to have a warm and fantastical ride.
Oscar-winning director del Toro had waited half his career to adapt Carlo Collodi’s classic tale and, though he never gave up nurturing the project, there were several periods of latency and creative changes throughout the years. When the project finally took flight with Netflix, del Toro was determined to make the film feel as handmade as its title character by using the oldest form of animation: stop-motion. He turned to award-winning stop-motion director, Mark Gustafson (The Fantastic Mr. Fox, California Raisins) and the best crafts professionals in the industry to execute his long-awaited vision.
Pinocchio is a whimsical tour-de-force that sees del Toro go back to his roots: As a teenager, the director began teaching Claymation classes in Guadalajara and it was during this time that he first dreamed of bringing a puppet to life with Pinocchio.
“I used to teach stop-motion and one of the guys in the class was infinitely better than I was at animating, so I partnered with him and said, ‘Why don’t you animate and I’ll come up with the ideas?’” says del Toro. “It was around that time I first thought about doing Pinocchio in stop-motion, but it would be more like Frankenstein – about a character thrown into the world as a blank slate to find out who he is, what he’s doing in this world and why he exists.”
The film was an enormous undertaking for the director’s first foray into a stop-motion animated feature, but the project represented an exciting prospect for him to enter a world where he could unleash his limitless imagination.
He was keen to flip the story and to depict an emotionally charged version of the 1940s Disney animation, and to make a film that dealt with complex issues that all audiences, young or old, could understand. Ultimately, del Toro’s Pinocchio is about love, grief, and the necessity of staying true to ourselves. The Mexican director did not want to shy away from these messages and believes that children are often underestimated when it comes to their capacity for comprehending complex themes.
“I think that we find ourselves in a world that has become far more complicated in the last few decades and kids now have questions and want to know about things that are really complex,” says del Toro. “Their emotions are very sophisticated, there’s a sense that the world needs dialogue about what is true and what is a lie. What are the ties that bind families and what it is to be human and be alive. These are important themes, emotions and ideas that percolate in the head of every kid right now. I think this fable is good-natured, brisk, funny and moving, but ultimately also allows for that type of dialogue.”
When del Toro set about crafting the story, which he co-wrote with Emmy-winning writer Patrick McHale, del Toro was adamant that Pinocchio should never turn into a real boy, nor should it be a goal to which he aspires and fails to achieve. “When I was a kid, I said, ‘So what it means to be loved, is that you have to change?’ I couldn’t accept that, so the writers took the classic material and retold a few strands of the original to change the key of how the material could sing.”
Working with McHale, whose credits include acclaimed animated TV series Adventure Time, was important for the director. “I knew I needed somebody who writes for animation because you write very differently for animation, the way you write dialogue is entirely different,” says del Toro.
It was also significant to set the film during Mussolini’s heyday with del Toro purposefully wanting “to show a world in which everybody behaves like a puppet and obeys, and the actual puppet is the only one who is disobedient and refuses to change.”
McHale, whose own great-grandfather was an Italian carpenter, extensively researched the historical context behind Collodi’s original work which he said was told through “a very childlike lens.” The writers wanted to keep that emotion in the world while also delivering a deep understanding of many of life’s absurdities through the perspective of a child.
Their intention as writers was to craft a story that could reach both parents and their children:
“Parents often have an idea of who their child is and when that child doesn’t fit into their mental mold, they try to force them to fit,” says McHale. “It felt like Guillermo’s take on the story would resonate with a lot of parents who are frustrated with their children’s behavior, and children who are frustrated with overbearing parents. Maybe it could help them to see things from the other perspective.
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el Toro has crafted a sophisticated, animated fantasy with a somewhat macabre approach. He directed alongside Mark Gustafson (Fantastic Mr. Fox) with the project being made at Shadow Machine in Portland, Oregon and Taller del Chucho in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Jim Henson Company acquired the rights to a 2002 edition of Collodi’s Pinocchio, which featured the illustrations of artist Gris Grimly, and the film team was able to use Grimly’s visual exploration of the story as a jumping off point for crafting the stop motion version. To further explore the character design for the film, del Toro engaged his long-time creative partner Guy Davis, who he had collaborated with on The Shape of Water and Nightmare Alley, and then ultimately, expert puppet makers Mackinnon and Saunders in Manchester, England, brought the three-dimensional versions of these characters to life.
They opted for handcrafted puppets and steered clear of anything that felt too cartoonish. “This is a story about puppets, acted by puppets,” says del Toro. “You don’t have to believe they are real people – you have to believe in them as characters. We wanted to embody the form and the character into one. We wanted design that told the story.”
The film is shot on real locations, with real sets and props and what shines through at every frame is that this is a mastercraft in all departments from production design to cinematography to costume design and more.
“I wanted to make a heartfelt movie,” said del Toro. “One I believe that any audience could watch but also take one of the most delicate, artisanal forms of animation and push it as much as possible. I think animation is coming to a crucial point in which we have to push it into the realm of being an art form that is recognized as cinema, and not a genre that is encircled by a family audience.
“Animation, to me, has to break that barrier by being a little more daring technically, a little more daring thematically, a little more daring in addressing the tale at its peak artistic form so that it resonates with us. Pinocchio is that type of story.”
