Guillermo del Toro was an entertainer, until the poop thief arrived
Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of The Pan's Labyrinth, the shape of waterY Pacific RimHe has always been an entertainer. But Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro, now available on Netflix, is his first animated feature and comes 30 years into his career. Things could have been very different. Before she made her debut with the 1992 vampire movie Chronosdel Toro was actually preparing a full-length stop-motion animated film.
"I started with animation," del Toro tells Polygon. "The first Super 8s I did were animation. I had an animation and effects company for 15 years. We did commercials. I started the stop-motion movement in my city. I taught stop-motion, and I was preparing a stop-motion film before Chronos."
Then disaster struck. "My brother, my then girlfriend and I made 120 clay puppets. We made the sets. And one night, we went to dinner and a movie. And when we got back, our place had been stolen. They had destroyed all the puppets, pooped and urinated on the floor. And I turned around, it was three years of work, and I said: 'I'm going to do Chronos. I'm going to do a live action movie.'"
Image: Netflix
It must have been a devastating blow. It took del Toro decades to find his way back into the medium, though his return seemed inevitable: as he characterizes it: "Since then, I've been taking a very deliberate detour back into animation." The "detour" included co-directing some episodes of his Netflix CGI animated series, troll hunters, and employs considerable practical creature effects and CGI sequences in his live-action films. "If you know Pacific Rimyou have seen 45 minutes of animation directed by me", he points out.
But throughout his creative life, one project has stayed on his mind that, according to him, had to be done solely in animation, and stop-motion animation at that: pinocchio. For del Toro, Carlo Collodi's 19th-century story of a wooden puppet coming to life was perfect for the medium, and he couldn't understand why no one else had done it yet.
"The first idea I had as a child was to do it in stop-motion, because that's how I thought, humans and [Pinocchio] they exist in the same world," he says. "The most difficult design element to resolve in a Pinocchio movie is that Pinocchio and humans need to feel like they belong in the same universe, and of course stop-motion solves everything."
Del Toro finally decided to do his stop-motion pinocchio 15 years ago. Most of that time was spent simply trying to finance the movie; Before Netflix, everyone turned it down. It was too uncommercial, too weird, too awkwardly situated between family audiences and adult audiences to be marketable. Once it finally got underway, the film took nearly three full years to make: production began in early 2020, simultaneously with del Toro's previous film, the noir drama. nightmare alley.
That sounds like a pain in the ass, but del Toro found directing both films at once "delightful," helped along by the way production on a stop-motion film ramps up slowly, as dictated by the steady pace. to which puppets, props, and sets can work. be manufactured.
"The thing to understand is that you don't start with all units in animation. You start with one unit. And you are generating X number of frames per day. So you double that. And now you're running two units and doubling the number of frames, then you're spawning four units and you're spawning four times. And eventually, we ended up with 65 units, give or take."
The final result is "a massive operation that ends up covering a thousand days of shooting", but the preparation is slow. while i was shooting nightmare alley, del Toro could start and end the day with detailed instructions for creating just a handful of frames of animation, which he found focused and refreshed. "I loved it. I loved it! It was almost a relief," he says. "It really was unbelievably beautiful. You know, starting the animation is so tiny, because you have to dictate certain gestures. And you have to explain the emotional state of the puppet, and the physical state of the puppet, and where you are in the story. That draws you back to the movie."
Del Toro says he "intends to continue" making animated films, but as he well knows, fate can intervene. pinocchio it wasn't supposed to be his first stop-motion film; Who can say if it will be the last? "It never happened in the order that I wanted it to," he says. "That's why we've been running this movie for about 15 years. It never happens when you want it, but it happens when it has to happen."