Guillermo del Toro was an animator — until a pooping burglar derailed him

Guillermo del Toro was the Mexican director Pan’s Labyrinth, Water’s ShapePlease see the following: Pacific RimHe has been an animator since the beginning. However, Guillermo del Toro’s PinocchioHis first animated feature film is ‘Animated Movie’, which he released on Netflix now, after 30 years of his career. It could have gone very differently. He made his first film with 1992’s Vampire Film. CronosDel Toro had actually been working to make a complete stop-motion animated movie.

“I started on animation,” del Toro tells Polygon. “The earliest Super 8s I did were animation. My animation and effects firm was in existence for fifteen years. We did commercials. In my town, I founded the stop-motion movement. It was my first stop-motion class. I also prepared stop-motion movies before. Cronos.”

Then disaster struck. “My brother, my then-girlfriend and I, we fabricated 120 puppets in clay. The sets were made by us. We went out to dinner one evening and saw a film. Our place was broken into when we returned. Every puppet had been destroyed, and they’d pooped on the floors. And I turned around — it was three years of work — and I said, ‘I’m gonna do Cronos. I’m gonna do a live-action movie.’”

Image courtesy of Netflix

That was a terrible blow. It took decades for del Toro to find his way back to the medium, although his return seemed inevitable: As he characterizes it: “Since then, I’ve been taking a very deliberate detour back to animation.” The “detour” included co-directing some episodes of his Netflix CGI animated series, TrollhuntersHis live-action films feature a variety of CGI effects and practical creature effects. “If you know Pacific Rim, you’ve seen 45 minutes of animation directed by me,” he points out.

He has had a single project in his creative mind all his life that he believed needed to be exclusively in animation and stop-motion animation. Pinocchio. For del Toro, Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century tale of a wooden puppet brought to life was perfect for the medium, and he couldn’t understand why nobody else had done it yet.

“The first idea I had when I was a kid was to do it in stop-motion, because I thought that way, the humans and [Pinocchio] exist in the same world,” he says. “The most difficult element of design to solve in a Pinocchio movie is that Pinocchio and the humans need to feel like they belong in the same universe, and of course, the stop-motion solves everything.”

Del Toro decided to make his final stop-motion Pinocchio15 years ago. It took most of the time to fund the film. Before Netflix, everyone turned him down. It wasn’t commercial, unusual or well-suited for adult and family audiences. Once finally underway, the film took almost a full three years to make: Production started in early 2020, simultaneously with del Toro’s previous movie, the noir drama Nightmare Alley.

That sounds like a headache, but del Toro found directing both movies at once “delicious,” aided by the way production on a stop-motion film ramps up slowly, as dictated by the steady pace at which the puppets, props, and sets can be manufactured.

Image courtesy of Netflix

“The thing to understand is, you don’t start with all the units on animation. One unit is enough. And you’re generating X number of frames a day. Double that. And now you’re directing two units and double the number of frames, then you generate four units, and you’re generating four times. And eventually, we ended up with 65 units, more or less.”

The end result is “a massive operation that ends up covering a thousand days of shoot,” but the buildup is slow. He was still shooting Nightmare AlleyDel Toro was able to start and finish the day by following the instructions. He could create just a few frames of animated animation. This kept him focused and refreshed. “I loved it. I loved it. It was almost a relief,” he says. “It really was incredibly beautiful. Because you need to dictate gestures, animation launch is very time-consuming. The emotional and physical states of the puppets, along with where they are located in the story, must be explained. That drags you right back into the movie.”

Del Toro says he “intends to continue” making animated movies, but as he well knows, fate may intervene. Pinocchio wasn’t supposed to be his first stop-motion movie; who can say whether it will be his last? “It’s never happened in the order I wanted it,” he says. “That’s why we carried this movie for about 15 years. It never happens when you want it, but it happens when it has to happen.”