How Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson Carved Their Own ‘Pinocchio’ Using Lessons From Hollywood, And Fascism – Contenders LA3C
deadline.comWhen Guillermo del Toro takes his shot at an animation classic, he doesn’t mess around. He and co-director Mark Gustafson took the Carlo Collodi creation Pinocchio but made a version unrecognizable compared to the 1940 Disney classic.
In the stop-motion animated film, Geppetto, the wood-carved boy and the cricket are there, but in a musical adventure that takes the tale in a direction all its own. “Very early on, I knew I wanted to make a disobedient Pinocchio, against the backdrop of the rise of Mussolini,” del Toro said during a panel for the Netflix movie at Deadline’s Contenders LA3C event. “But I didn’t have a path until I saw the design of Pinocchio from Gus Grimly.
I asked him, why does it look like that and he said, because he has the nails and the wood. Carlo Collodi had the faint echo of Jesus in Pinocchio, and I thought, this is a great opportunity to use the nails, and the wood to make him a messiah that resurrects.
All these ideas start coming. I asked him, why does [the puppet] look like that? And he said, Geppetto was drunk. I thought, why is he drunk?
Read more on deadline.com