Guillermo del Toro on Pinocchio for Netflix: Doing puppetries from Guadalajara, Portland and London was difficult but fruitful

The creator of Pinocchio for Netflix, Guillermo del Toro, said that took him more than a decade to see finished the film and that they made an effort to get the expressiveness and nature of a piece of animation made by hand so it could be “a beautiful artisan exercise of carving, painting, and sculpture”. During a press conference, he expressed his pride in making Mexican talent known.

He included in the project 40 members of El taller de Chucho, a team of filmmaker puppeteers from Guadalajara, who worked together with two other teams of puppeteers, one in London and the other in Portland. “Logistically it was complicated, but it was very fruitful. We had to interact with London, Portland, and Guadalajara, and triangulate people. A group went to London to learn more technically challenging puppet making,” he explained.

The film that will premiere on December 9 is a reinvention of the classic Pinocchio tale, as he is on his quest to find his place in the world. At the same time, it is a reflection of paternity and the human being’s nature.

Guillermo del Toro also talked about what makes his version different from others. “First of all, I would say that most of the other Pinocchio stories are about obedience. Ours is about disobedience. Disobedience is a primary factor in becoming human and doing so does not mean changing oneself or others, but understanding.” He revealed that Pinocchio and Frankenstein marked his childhood and adolescence.

“About ten years ago I made a promise to start focusing more and more on animation because it is a film and it is art. It is not a genre, nor is it for children,” he said about the project made in stop motion.

The English company Mackinnon & Saunders was responsible for the manufacture of the puppets, which reached great technical levels with “head mechanics”, which allows animating facial expressions with an organic quality, reported Georgina Haynes, head of Character Creation in Portland.

“It’s like a Swiss watch placed under a silicone head, allowing the animator to manipulate frame by frame in order to obtain the facial renderings. And I say a Swiss watch, which is actually a multitude of little ball joints that hold the skin together,” Haynes explained.

Del Toro wrote this remake with Patrick McHale and co-directed the film with Mark Gustafson. Gustafson, who was also at the press conference, said that both worked in great harmony. The two agreed that to make the film more humane, they would animate mistakes and botches while avoiding pantomime.

Production designers, Guy Davis and Curt Enderle, and art director, Robert DeSue, said that they began working on the characters in the development process, starting from Gus Grimly’s drawing of the main character. The team spoke about the passion and tremendous attention to detail everyone put into this film, which they called a piece of art.