Receiving a warm greeting from the audience, Guillermo del Toro took the stage at The Annecy Film Festival and presented the world premiere of eight minutes of his version of Pinocchio shot in stop-motion.
In the first excerpt screened we find Geppetto meeting the wooden stump come to life for the first time. The characters are different from all the versions we have seen before. For example, Geppetto looks completely drunk, just as hinted at in Collodi’s fairy tale, gets up from the floor and stumbles into his creaking workshop with bloodshot eyes.
“Our goal was to push the acting,” the director said about the film. “To animate silence and useless gestures. We said, let’s make the characters make mistakes. Let’s do in four gestures what others would do in one. Let’s give them itches and headaches and make this world seem lived in.”
Following a child living under the fascist regime, the film will join Del Toro’s previous works The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, completing a thematic trilogy for the director. Del Toro told the Annecy audience that he has been working on this project since 2011 and that his story will focus on imperfect fathers and imperfect children, touching on a very personal and recurring theme in his films.
Netflix’s first animation showcase was in many ways the central event of this year’s Annecy Animated Film Festival.
In fact, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is not the only stop-motion production coming to Netflix this fall, as the animation showcase opened with the presentation of Wendell & Wild, the latest work by Henry Selick, co-written and produced with Jordan Peele. The creator of The Nightmare Before Christmas returns to direct a feature film thirteen years after Coraline.
