Mexican film director Guillermo del Toro. Pan’s Labyrinth, shape of waterWhen pacific rim, was always an animator.However Pinocchio by Guillermo del Torois currently out on Netflix and is his first animated feature film, arriving in the 30th year of his career. Things could have been very different. Dating back before he made his debut in the 1992 Vampire film ChronosDel Toro was actually preparing a full-length stop-motion animated film.
“I started with animation,” del Toro tells Polygon. “The first Super 8 I did was animation. I ran an animation and effects company for 15 years. We did commercials. I started the stop-motion movement in my city. I teach stop motion and used to prepare stop motion movies Chronos“
Then disaster struck. “My brother, then-girlfriend and I made 120 clay dolls. When our place was robbed, they destroyed all the dolls, pooped and peeed on the floor, and I turned around — it was three years of work — and I said ChronosI’m going to do a live action movie.
It must have been a devastating blow. It took decades before Toro found a way back into the media, but his return seemed inevitable. “Detour” involved him co-directing several episodes of his Netflix CGI animated series. troll hunterand employs quite a few practical creature effects and CGI sequences in his live-action films. pacific rimyou’ve seen the 45-minute animation I directed,” he points out.
But one project remained in his mind throughout his creative life. It’s what he felt, animation and stop-motion that he felt needed to be done in animation alone. PinocchioFor del Toro, the story of Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century wooden puppets coming to life was a perfect fit for the medium.
“When I was a kid, the first thing that came to my mind was to do it in stop motion, because that’s how I thought about it. [Pinocchio] We exist in the same world,” he says. “The most difficult design element to solve in the Pinocchio movie is that Pinocchio and humans need to feel like they belong in the same universe. Of course, stop motion solves everything.”
Del Toro finally decided to make stop motion Pinocchio 15 years ago. Most of that time was just trying to fund the film. Before Netflix, everyone turned him down. It was too non-commercial, too bizarre, and awkwardly positioned between family and adult audiences to be marketable. It took years. Production began in early 2020, alongside del Toro’s previous noir drama. nightmare alley.
As much as it sounds like a headache, del Toro will direct both films at once, aided by the slow-paced way stop-motion filmmaking, where puppets, props and sets are directed at a steady pace. I felt that it was “delicious”. manufactured.
“The thing to understand is that you don’t start with every unit of animation. You start with 1 unit. And you’re generating X frames in a day. And now you’re directing 2 units, doubling the number of frames, generating 4 units, generating 4 times, and finally, more or less to 65 units became.”
The end result is a “massive operation spanning 1,000 days of filming,” but slow to build.while he shoots nightmare alley, del Toro was able to start and end the day with detailed instructions for creating just a handful of frames of animation. “I loved it. It was fun! Almost a relief,” he says. “It was really incredibly beautiful. Activating the animation is very easy because you have to direct certain gestures. I have to explain where I am, which brings you back to the movie.
Del Toro has said he intends to “continue” making animated films, but as he knows all too well, fate may intervene. Pinocchio It was never supposed to be his first stop-motion film. Who can say if it will be his last? “It never happened in the order I wanted it to,” he says. “That’s what kept this movie going for about 15 years. It never happens when you want it to happen, but it happens when it has to happen.”