DIRECTOR EXCLUSIVE
Puppet Master
The wooden boy with a nose for trouble gets a stunning stop-motion make-over in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Pinocchio and Count Volpe get ready to go shopping.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO HAS BEEN preparing to make a stop-motion animation his whole life. “I’ve been doing it since I was a kid,” he says, noting that his earliest shorts were Super 8 claymation. Later, before he made his 1993 debut Cronos, he was planning a stop-motion feature, until his workshop was burgled.
“After three years of sculpting 120 puppets and sets, they destroyed it all on the first week of filmmaking. And I said, ‘Live action it is for me!’” Now the Mexican maestro behind The Shape Of Water and Nightmare Alley is finally able to realise that life-long dream with a fresh new take on Pinocchio. The story of the wooden boy whose nose grows every time he lies, penned by Carlo Collodi in 1883 and later turned into the beloved 1940 Walt Disney cartoon, has long enchanted del Toro, right back to his childhood in Guadalajara. “It was one of the early movies I saw with my mother and brother,” he says.