“It’s so good to know that this art form, that we love so much, stop motion, is very much alive and well.”

— Mark Gustafson, Co-director of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) in his Oscars Acceptance Speech

Congratulations to the entire team from Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for their win in this year’s Oscars on Sunday for Best Animated Feature! From the podium Gustafson, who directed alongside del Toro, spoke to the art form we do love so well and thanked animation production studio Shadow Machine and The Jim Henson Company.

Del Toro echoed his co-director’s sentiments in his own speech: “Animation is cinema…animation is not a genre…and animation is ready to be taken to the next step, please help us. We are all ready for it. Keep animation in the conversation.”

According to the Hollywood Reporter, del Toro–now the first filmmaker to win best picture, director and animated feature, continued that actual conversation himself backstage, saying, “This is an art form that has kept being kneecapped commercially and industrially and at the kid’s table for so long.”

He went on to say that he currently has two scholarships for filmmakers and would be committing to financing a stop motion class in Mexico, adding, “It will help us give more movies in the community in Mexico and in Latin America, to keep pushing for stop motion, which is one of the most democratic forms of animation. All the other forms of animation are too difficult or too expensive. But a kid can put a camera on the wall in their room, they can do animation in stop motion.”

The film takes a slightly spookier look at the children’s favorite and del Toro has been widely quoted as saying that when he first saw the Disney version, he loved it because he thought it captured how scary childhood felt to him.

Character art and technical director, Georgina Hayns, spoke to the film’s producer, Netflix, about the way del Toro drew inspiration from author Gris Grimly’s illustrated edition of Carlo Collodi’s original novel. “We did change the head,” she said. “That was really to get the performance that we needed out of our wooden boy. Because he was going to be the lead character in a feature, we wanted to be able to get more emotion. The original illustration had a much simpler face. So Guillermo got Guy Davis to work on Gris’ illustrations just to bring it into a place that we were all happy with –– to get the performance, but still keep the magic of Gris’ Pinocchio.”

Hayns added that the team ended up making 32 Pinocchio puppets so that each animator was working with one, because he’s in most of the shots. “We are constantly adapting the puppets,” she revealed. “Our puppet hospital is adapting puppets for each individual shot. So maybe a puppet will need to stretch really far, and its arm just doesn’t stretch that far. We’ll add an extra joint to help it stretch that far. And each different animator wants a different tension of the puppet. They’ll come to us and say, ‘Oh, can you loosen the neck? Can you tighten the wrist?’ Depending on what the action is, for that shot. So, we’ll have to go in and literally get into the skeleton of the puppet through the costume and adapt that puppet for the animator’s needs.”

Production Designer, Curt Enderle, also told Netflix, “When some of the images were released from the nearly-to-production version, I was mesmerized. I was just starting to work on stop-motion film after a decade of doing primarily commercials, so, while I wanted to work to bring those images to life, I had no idea how to make that happen.

“I enjoyed bringing the detail of theater to the carnival [scenes],” Enderle went on. “The inspiration of the scenery, the backstage dressing and the details feel right. Not too slick or modern for a down-on-it’s-luck carnival. Painted drops, cut shapes, lots of ropes and slightly dodgy construction. And always a bit of a mess with things left over for the evolving show.”

While it sounds like the production had its bumps (what animation shoot doesn’t) from heat waves to the pandemic, the end result is widely celebrated as doing exactly what Gustafson and del Toro are hoping for: keeping stop motion alive…just like a real boy.