Making of ‘Pinocchio’: How Guillermo del Toro Updated the Beloved Tale for Contemporary Audiences

The joy in Guillermo del Toro’s face has been abundantly apparent this awards season each time he introduces his latest big-screen outing, a deeply personal animated version of Pinocchio told in the Mexican helmer’s typically sumptuous, meticulously crafted visual style.

When the Oscar-winning filmmaker was growing up, Carlo Collodi’s 1883 fable about a wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy was one of his favorites, and del Toro has now made the oft-told tale (Disney released its own ill-received live-action version, starring Tom Hanks, in September) distinctly his own: a darker, timely retelling for today’s audiences, set in fascist Italy during the 1930s.

Pinocchio is del Toro’s first foray into directing stop-motion animation, an art form that dates back to the early days of motion pictures and which was developed by filmmaking pioneers del Toro has long admired, such as George Méliès (1902’s A Trip to the Moon), Willis O’Brien (King Kong, from 1933) and Ray Harryhausen (1963’s Jason and the Argonauts). The auteur, who won a best director Oscar in 2018 for The Shape of Water, says that given the overwhelmingly positive experience he had making Pinocchio — not to mention where he is in his career — this won’t be his last project involving animation. “My hope right now is to slow down, and the ideal place to slow down for me is animation, because it is far more my speed,” he tells THR. “We were able to react to the material on a week-to-week basis. We were able to re-board sequences, we were able to add sequences. It is really a beautiful pace that is more deliberate, but also just simply more organic to the way I like to make movies. I intend to, if I can, transition between live action and animation, and slowly but surely lean toward animation.”

The film’s voice cast includes newcomer Gregory Mann, who was 10 years old when he was chosen for the title role. Del Toro reteamed with numerous actors with whom he had worked before, including David Bradley, from del Toro’s sci-fi/horror series The Strain (the voice of Geppetto), as well as frequent collaborator Ron Perlman (the voice of Podestà); and Cate Blanchett from last year’s Nightmare Alley (who provided the vocalizations for the monkey Spazzatura). The voice cast is rounded out by Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket; Christoph Waltz as ringmaster Volpe; and Tilda Swinton, who plays both the Wood Sprite, who grants Pinocchio life, and Death.

A Netflix release — the film is receiving a short theatrical run before premiering on the streaming service Dec. 9 — Pinocchio was written by del Toro and Patrick McHale (best known for the Cartoon Network fantasy series Adventure Time). The director says that by exploring the fascist milieu of 1930s Italy, he and McHale hoped to draw direct parallels to today, with authoritarianism — and protests against it — on the rise throughout the world. “I was hoping to talk about things that were very important for me and that would reflect today. One of the things that I cherish as a virtue is disobedience,” del Toro says. “I thought that the idea of Pinocchio behaving as a free agent and a disobedient soul in a time when obedience is expected of everyone would be very important, especially in a moment like now.”

The director adds that working in fantasy offers the opportunity to explore these themes. “I think fantasy is always illuminated by the larger arena of either philosophy or politics or ideas. That’s what makes it new and interesting again,” he says. “I thought this movie could embrace imperfection and could embrace freedom as antidotes to a suffocating dictatorship.”

But he is quick to add that Pinocchio is not merely a political treatise; the tale has a universal quality that touches on everything from the inevitability of death to the challenges — and dangers — of parenting. “I thought it was important to deal with how briefly we have each other and how life is made valuable by death, which are concepts that are very, very Mexican, but [ones] that, ultimately, I believe in,” del Toro says. The director explains that the film is “thematically about different types of fatherhood — what it is to be a father, what it is to be a child. And there are different types of parental figures in the movie. Some are lethal, some are exploitative, some are permeable to love. And, finally, a very paternalistic concern is the fascist idea of the Fatherland and the father-figure style of leadership.”

As in all of del Toro’s work, an emphasis on design was paramount, and the film’s thematic complexity is reflected in its overall look. “One of the [descriptions] he loved using for our world was ‘perfectly imperfect,’ ” co-production designer Guy Davis says of his longtime collaborator. “There’s a sense of realism but not reality.”

Of course, the story starts with a puppet, and the design of the eponymous wooden boy began with inspiration from the illustrations of noted children’s book author and illustrator Gris Grimly (who was also a co-producer on the film). “He created a really simple, incredibly powerful, almost elemental distillation of what a wooden boy would be,” says del Toro. “And that figure is what gave me the idea that this could work as a stop-motion.”

To achieve the look he was hoping for, del Toro turned to Portland, Oregon, a hub for stop-motion talent, and approached Mark Gustafson — a veteran of the former Will Vinton Studios (the studio behind the California Raisins) who was animation director on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox — to team up on directing. They then partnered with animation production company ShadowMachine (Robot Chicken, BoJack Horseman), with founders Alex Bulkley and Corey Campodonico boarding the movie as producers (del Toro, Henson Company CEO Lisa Henson and Gary Ungar, a producer on The Strain, also produced). Most of the film was made at ShadowMachine, which had as many as 60 small stages operating simultaneously for roughly three years while the movie was in production.

Del Toro asserts that “animators are actors,” and that’s how he approached production. “We guaranteed the animators that they would be treated like actors, that between ‘action’ and ‘cut’ they could make decisions and show them to us. That’s why we credited the animators in the front of the credits right next to the cast.”

One of the biggest skills in creating stop-motion is breathing life into the puppets’ movements and gestures. There are various ways of constructing puppets for stop-motion, and the filmmakers mostly used the method that involves internal face mechanics covered by a movable silicone skin. “You can really connect with the puppet, deeply,” says del Toro of this type of construction.

Pinocchio, however, was created with replacement animation, meaning that the animators replaced face parts to create various expressions frame by frame. Head of puppet fabrication Georgina Hayns explains that this is because it was crucial that Pinocchio appear to be made of wood (the main Pinocchio puppet was 9½ inches tall — the “most manageable” height for a stop-motion puppet, according to Hayns). “We did an early test with the silicone skin and it didn’t work, it looked like rubber. [Replacement animation] allowed us to keep the wood grain. The whole look of Pinocchio is a stylized realism.”

Because animation doesn’t have production sound like there would be on a live-action set, every character and sound in this world had to be created from scratch. Supervising sound editor and designer Scott Gershin (another del Toro alum, from Pacific Rim and others) says that the creation of Pinocchio’s sounds when he moves involved a lot of wood, including maple, mahogany and rosewood guitar woods, but also Foley work and library sounds. “If we only stayed with wood, it only gave us one dimension to the vocabulary of Pinocchio. So then we started adding in little squeaks [and other sounds],” he recalls. “We wanted to find the delicacy of some metal squeaks, a little bit of rubber squeaks, and many different types of wood that we used to really define all the emotions of his movement.”

He adds that the character’s sounds evolve over the course of the film, suggesting that he is becoming more “real” as the story progresses. “We wanted to make him feel like he would just fall apart at any moment,” Gershin says of when Pinocchio first comes to life. “So he was creaky and just felt very loose-sounding. … As he talks and he starts getting more personality, we start pulling back the fragility of Pinocchio and we stop thinking of him as a creature. Now we start thinking of him as a character who represents innocence.”

Because of his small size, Cricket — a combination of mechanical and replacement parts — presented one of the more challenging tasks for the creative team. In the end, the artists made a 9½-inch hero (or main) cricket to perform, in some cases alongside a “very large-scale Pinocchio head” for shots of both characters. Smaller crickets were created for long shots. “We also had to make stunt crickets for all the funny scenes where he’s squashed on multiple occasions through the movie,” Hayns says. “We made Claymation, one-off heads that could be frame-by-frame squashed. And then, for the body, we did a hollow skin of silicone with aluminum wire and metal armature underneath. So you could literally squash the body and then the wings, which we pre-bent in very intentional crushed shapes.”

Puppets were also dressed in real fabric costumes. “We did a lot of costume reference searching from Italy of that time period,” Hayns explains, adding that for the ringmaster Volpe’s costume, “we found a dogtooth weave on a tiny scale in a woolen, woven fabric that has all the right stretch qualities. So we used that fabric, but then we dyed it and painted into it to accentuate the dogtooth.”

Such meticulous work also went into the overall production design. Davis, who shared production designer responsibilities with Curt Enderle, says they researched villages in Northern Italy during the time period, and Geppetto’s town is ultimately an amalgam of various places and inspirations, weathered and textured. “There’s a sense of history to everything. And I think that’s one of the things that grounded the film. It’s not too slick or cute. It’s a lived-in world, with its own past.”

For del Toro, all of this obsessive attention to detail would ultimately mean nothing if his version of Pinocchio wasn’t connecting emotionally and thematically, so he was careful to ensure that the film’s technical mastery wasn’t overshadowing its sense of humanity, particularly when it came to Pinocchio’s journey.

“Everybody learns from him as opposed to him learning from everybody,” he says, pointing to how his version of the story is a kind of “reversal” of its traditional telling. “You don’t have to change who you are to be loved, you don’t have to turn into a ‘real boy’ through obedience to be loved.”

This story first appeared in the Nov. 30 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.