Yahoo News Guillermo del Toro Hopes Animation’s Current Box Office Success Will Help More Adventurous Movies Get Made
Animation was his first love. And, if Guillermo del Toro has his way, it will be his last.
“There are a couple more live-action movies I want to do but not many,” the Pinocchio and Shape of Water director told the audience at the Annecy animation festival on Tuesday. “After that, I only want to do animation. That’s the plan.”
More from The Hollywood Reporter
World of Wonder Founders Tackle Drag Backlash: "We're at This Tipping Point"
Guest Column: 'From Scratch' Showrunner on Gaining the Trust to Tell Her Sister's Story
Del Toro, who said he first started making “what I thought was animation” when he was 8 years old using his father’s Super 8 camera, is following up his Oscar-nominated Pinocchio with another animated feature for Netflix: an adaptation of The Buried Giant, based on the grown-up fantasy novel by Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. The book follows an elderly British couple living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one can retain their long-term memories. Del Toro, who will produce as well as direct The Buried Giant, and is co-writing the script with Matilda the Musical writer Dennis Kelly, plans to shoot the film using the same stop-motion technique he used on Pinocchio.
“I believe you can make an adult fantasy drama with stop-motion and move people emotionally,” said del Toro. “I think stop-motion can be intravenous, it can go straight to your emotions in a way that no other medium can.”
Del Toro said the recent string of animated box office hits, including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, could provide a window for the production of more adventurous and “rule-breaking” films in the genre. He also cited Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which premiered at Annecy and hits theaters in August.
“The three hits of Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mario are moving things, allowing a little more latitude, but there are still big fights to be had,” he said. “Animation to me is the purest form of art, and it’s been kidnapped by a bunch of hoodlums. We have to rescue it. [And] I think that we can Trojan-horse a lot of good shit into the animation world.”
The 58-year-old filmmaker spent a good portion of his Annecy master class deriding what he sees as destructive tendencies in much commercial animation where characters and emotions are “codified into a sort of teenage rom-com, almost emoji-style behavior. [If] I see a character raising his fucking eyebrow, or crossing his arms, having a sassy pose — oh, I hate that shit. [Why] does everything act as if they’re in a sitcom? I think is emotional pornography. All the families are happy and sassy and quick, everyone has a one-liner. Well, my dad was boring. I was boring. Everybody in my family was boring. We had no one-liners. We’re all fucked up. That’s what I want to see animated. I would love to see real life in animation. I actually think it’s urgent. think it’s urgent to see real life in animation.”
For Pinocchio, del Toro said he tried to make the style more lifelike by adding “unnecessary, inefficient gestures” of movement that exist in reality but rarely in animation. “In animation, everyone is very efficient. If they sit and grab a glass of water, they do it in four movements. In real life, we do it in eight and we usually kind of fuck it up. So I said: Let’s make things inefficient. [I think] particularly now, we need things that look like they were made by humans to recuperate the human spirit. I fucking hate perfection. I love things that look handmade. And stop-motion as true handmade, hand-carved cinema.”
The enemy, del Toro told the audience of mainly animation students, was not artificial intelligence, but good old corporate stupidity.
“When people say they’re scared of AI, I say don’t be afraid of any intelligence; be afraid of stupidity. Every intelligence is artificial. Stupidity is natural. Completely, 100 percent natural, organic. Be afraid of stability. That’s the real enemy.” Referencing studio speech, he noted: “I think when somebody calls stories ‘content,’ when somebody says ‘pipeline,’ they’re using sewage language.”
Del Toro, quite a potty mouth himself, warned students that they will have to deal with a film industry “that is geared toward grinding out shit and destroying your art.” He noted that he still gets rejected, regularly, by the studios. “They still say no to me. In the last two months, they said no to five of my projects. So it doesn’t go away. Making movies is eating a sandwich of shit. There’s always shit, just sometimes you get a little more bread with yours. The rate of productivity against your efforts will remain frustratingly difficult, and frustratingly long. And you will always encounter assholes. But have faith in the stories you want to tell and wait until someone wants to buy them.”
Best of The Hollywood Reporter
