Guillermo del Toro was an animator – until a shitting burglar derailed him

Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of Pan’s Labyrinth, The shape of the waterand Pacific RimShe has always been an animator. but Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro, now available on Netflix, is his first animated feature film, coming 30 years into his career. It could have turned out very differently. Back before he debuted the 1992 vampire film Chronosdel Toro was actually preparing a full-length stop-motion animated film.

“I started out in animation,” del Toro tells Polygon. “The earliest Super 8 films 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 before that I prepared a stop motion film Chronos.”

Then disaster struck. “My brother, my then girlfriend and I made 120 clay dolls. We did the sentences. And one night we went out to dinner and to the movies. And when we came back we had been broken into. They had destroyed every doll, they had pooped and peed on the floor. And I turned around – it’s been three years of work – and I said, ‘I can do this Chronos. I’m going to do a live-action film.’”

Image: Netflix

It must have been a devastating blow. It was decades before del Toro found his way back to the medium, though his return seemed inevitable: “I’ve since taken a very conscious detour back to animation,” as he characterizes it. The “detour” included co-directing a few episodes of his Netflix CGI animated series, trollhunter, and uses considerable hands-on creature effects and CGI sequences in his live-action films. “If you know Pacific RimThey saw 45 minutes of animation that I directed,” he points out.

But throughout his creative life, one project stuck in his mind that he felt had to be done entirely in animation and stop-motion animation: Pinocchio. For del Toro, Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century tale of a wooden doll brought to life was perfect for the medium, and he couldn’t understand why nobody had done it before.

“The first idea I had as a kid was to do it in stop motion because that’s how I thought, the people and [Pinocchio] exist in the same world,” he says. “The most difficult design element to solve in a Pinocchio film is that Pinocchio and the people have to feel like they belong to the same universe, and of course the stop motion solves everything.”

Del Toro finally decided to do his stop motion Pinocchio 15 years ago. Most of the time was spent trying to finance the film; before Netflix everyone turned him down. It was too uncommercial, too weird, too awkwardly positioned between family and adult audience to be marketable. When the film finally got underway, production took almost a full three years: Production began in early 2020, coinciding with del Toro’s previous film, the drama noir nightmare alley.

It sounds like a headache, but del Toro found it “delicious” to direct both films simultaneously, aided by the way a stop-motion film’s production ramps up slowly as dictated by the constant pace at which the puppets, props and sets can be made.

Image: Netflix

“You have to understand that you don’t start with all the animation units. You start with one unit. And you generate X frames per day. Then you double that. And now direct two units and double the number of frames, then you generate four units and you generate four times. And we ended up with more or less 65 units.”

The end result is “a massive operation that will end up taking a thousand days of shooting,” but the build-up is slow. while he was shooting nightmare alley, del Toro was able to start and end the day with detailed instructions for creating just a handful of animation frames that left him focused and refreshed. “I loved it. Loved it! It was almost a relief,” he says. “It was really incredibly beautiful. You know, starting animations is so tiny because you have to dictate certain gestures. And you have to understand the emotional state of the Explaining the doll and the physical state of the doll and where you are in the story pulls you right back into the movie.”

Del Toro says he “intends to move on” to making animated films, but as he well knows, fate can intervene. Pinocchio was not 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 why we carried this film for about 15 years. It never happens when you want it, but it happens when it has to happen.”