Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion animated version of the beloved children’s tale “Pinocchio” has been sweeping this awards season.
The movie won big over the weekend at the Producers Guild of America and Annie Awards, as we inch closer to the Oscars. The movie is nominated for Best Animated Feature.
The two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker explained how creating the film was a labor of love.
“Each of these puppets has a skeleton and a mechanical head, inside you can change the expression. You do that frame-by-frame, meaning you move it and take a photo. You do that 24 times and you get one second of action,” he explained to KTLA 5’s Sam Rubin.
Due to this process, it took a thousand days to shoot the one-hour and 54-minute movie.
The puppets themselves are pretty pricey, del Toro said each one “costs more or less what a Lexus would.”
Not only are the puppets handcrafted, but the entire movie’s set is also.
“Any other movie, they need a chair or a table, they rent it from a place- we have to make it. We need a blade of grass or a rock, we have to make the rock we have to make the dirt,” del Toro revealed.
The “Shape of Water” filmmaker prefers it this way because it’s “more beautiful.”
“At this moment in time, when everything is done by computers when everything is done by AI or digital, it’s so heartwarming to see something that feels miniaturized,” he said
The movie’s success is not lost on del Toro and his team, as it’s possibly one of the longest stop-motion films ever made.
The craftsmanship of the film is currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
With the film being so arduous, del Toro said they were “ruthless” when it came to scrapping things that weren’t working in order to capture the emotion of the story.
“The main thing about animation is emotion. Animation gives you a direct line to emotion because we want those puppets to live, we want those characters to live and there’s a tenderness and love to this kind of movie,” he said.
The movie, which is currently streaming on Netflix, was such a success that del Toro and the streamer are working on another stop-motion project called “The Buried Giant,” an adaptation of a novel by the same name.
The Academy Awards are on March 12 in Los Angeles. It will be broadcast on ABC.