‘Pinocchio’ puts Guillermo del Toro to the test of time

In Chronos (1993), his feature debut, Guillermo del Toro earned a reputation for being obsessive with the smallest details. For that film, the then new director commissioned a jeweler to design and manufacture the artifact that gave eternal life and is at the center of the plot. The craftsman made several replicas that, with the passage of time and the rise of the legend of the Mexican director, became valuable objects of Mexican cinema. Some of these copies were stolen. Del Toro (Guadalajara, Mexico, 58 years old) has given new rein to his obsessions with Pinocchiohis first film made with stop-motion, an animation technique of puppets that change position frame by frame. “I want to say it soon: animation is cinema, it is art. It’s not a genre and it’s not for children,” said the filmmaker a few days ago at a conference with some media outlets, including EL PAÍS.

“The stop-motion it’s in perpetual extinction because it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of effort and it’s all physical,” he said. The shooting of Pinocchio, which Coming to Netflix on December 9, took 1,000 days and required the coordination of teams of specialists in Portland, United States, Manchester, England, and Guadalajara, Mexico. Although this is his first film with this technique, Del Toro has been linked to animation for a decade. He has served as a producer and director for Dreamworks studios, for whom he has made the series of trollhunters Y tales of arcadia.

The technique has reminded Del Toro of his origins. It was the same one he used in his first short films. He thought of debuting with a feature in this format, where the protagonists were made of clay. However, someone vandalized the animation studio he had with his partner and destroyed a hundred puppets while the director and his friend watched. Viridian, by Luis Bunuel. So he was left with no choice but to start a production of flesh and blood people.

The clay figures of Gepetto and Pinocchio, in a scene from the film.Netflix

Decades later, Del Toro returns to the most famous puppet in the history of cinema. Italian Carlo Collodi’s late-19th-century tale is a temptation hard to avoid. When Cate Blanchett was filming Nightmare Alley and he knew that it was the next project of his director, he asked him to be part of it. Fat, as they call it, told him that all the fish had been distributed, except for one piece of paper. She hit the monkey, who doesn’t have a single dialogue.

Pinocchio it is also so familiar that it can become hackneyed. 2022 already saw a new adaptation of the story, which began to be published weekly in the newspaper. Disney released a version in the summer live action from the 1940 tape. The film by Robert Zemeckis provoked almost unanimous rejection. Critics blamed the director of Forrest Gump Y Contact that his version did not contribute anything to the classic of children’s animation.

Del Toro promises not to make the same mistake: “Almost every version of Pinocchio out there is about obedience. Ours is about disobedience,” says the Mexican filmmaker, who co-directed the film with Mark Gustafson. “There is something very beautiful in the story of a puppet who refuses to obey. All the others behave like puppets, or conform. This, but said with the puppets, is really something magical”.

Guillermo del Toro during the filming of 'Pinocchio'.
Guillermo del Toro during the filming of ‘Pinocchio’.NETFLIX

The first minutes of the film show a more rustic version of Geppetto (David Bradley), a skilled carpenter in a small Italian town where the arrival of the Second World War conflict begins to be felt. The images soon make it clear that he is a man grieving for his son. “We follow him much more in the loss of him, the pain of him, the understanding of him. He is not only a vehicle that serves as a father figure, but he has a lot of weight… he is one of my favorite actors, ”indicates del Toro.

The cricket, whose voice corresponds to Ewan McGregor, is instead a heavier and stranger character, an admirer of the philosopher Schopenhauer. Unlike the Disney film, it is the insect who learns humility and fragility from the puppet that comes to life.

The filmmaker from Guadalajara considers that his Pinocchio closes a trilogy about childhood and the war that began with The Devil’s backbone (2001) and deepened with The Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). “Everything is an Easter egg, it’s full of details,” says Del Toro, who asks to be alert to the appearance of the fantastic being that earned him his first Oscar nomination in one of the moments of the film and a nod to the shape of waterthe tape with which he triumphed in 2018 with two Academy Awards.

Director Guillermo del Toro during the world premiere of 'Pinocchio' in London, in October 2022.
Director Guillermo del Toro during the world premiere of ‘Pinocchio’ in London, in October 2022. Wiktor Szymanowicz (Getty Images)

all in the Pinocchio of del Toro, as in Chronospoints to the passage of time. The filmmaker claims to have started developing the film 14 years ago. The production suffered a vital shock in 2009, when he backpedaled and started the script from scratch. In 2018, Del Toro suffered another turnaround with the death of his father, Federico, in Guadalajara. “That added a lot of depth to the emotions in this movie, saying how short life is and how we only have each other for a brief moment,” says a filmmaker whose films have even caused nightmares with love stories. of the.

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‘Pinocchio’ puts Guillermo del Toro to the test of time