Acclaimed filmmaker Guillermo del Toro hopes that his new film Pinocchio will lead to a stop-motion animation revival.
At a press event for his latest Netflix film, del Toro discussed, via Polygon, why he chose stop-motion animation for his version of the beloved children’s musical. The director discussed how his team, led by co-director Mark Gustafson, ensured that no digital shortcuts were taken while bringing Pinocchio to life. Del Toro wanted Pinocchio to feel authentic and resist the "codification of animation in a ‘cool’ language that is almost like emojis." He said, "I wanted to return the controls of animation to the animators, and treat [the animators] as actors." The entire team on the film was encouraged to make "failed acts" which are essentially imperfections made by a live actor that make a performance feel real.
Del Toro shared his views on stop-motion being a lost art and how sacred and beautiful the bond is between the puppet and the animator. He explained, "Stop-motion is absolutely the most incredibly, exhaustively demanding animation, you know, and it’s only done by a group of complete and utter strange people that sustain it, time and time again."
The 2018 Best Achievement in Directing Oscar winner for The Shape of Water notably compared stop-motion animation to a Japanese art form called bunraku. According to del Toro, bunraku involves "an actor in black garb [who] puts a puppet in front, and manipulates it with his own limbs. And they play against a black background, and the puppet only becomes alive through the life of the puppeteer. And this is something that you can see here."
Guillermo del Toro's Stop-Motion Revival
Thus, a newfound admiration for practical effects has led del Toro to resist CG and retain the authenticity of stop-motion animation. "Stop-motion animation — there’s no good or bad, but as of lately, the last 20 years, it has moved to a point, technically and philosophically, when it was almost indistinguishable from CG animation," He said. "And we wanted the immediacy of a set that, you know, was carved and sculpted, aged in a way that was manually done."
He was not alone in this retro philosophy. According to del Toro, Brian Leif Hansen, Pinocchio's animation supervisor, insisted that everything was done in stop-motion, even if it was "silly or impractical." Further elaborating on the design and creation of the film, the director stated, "Small items like popcorn or ashes would be shot practically, held by tiny wires that would then be erased digitally; fire, water and snow were created with practical materials that were then scaled and replicated digitally. The most difficult thing to pull off was the ocean."
Pinocchio was shot between three studios in Portland, Oregon; U.K, and Guadalajara, Mexico. The film stars Gregory Mann as the titular character, Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket and David Bradley as Master Geppetto. The film had its world premiere at the London Film Festival on Oct. 15.
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio debuts on Netflix on Dec. 9. It will also arrive in select theaters in November.
Source: Polygon