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Animation has become,
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in the minds of the consumers, a genre.
But it also is an art form,
and of all the art forms of animation,
to me, the most sacred and magical
is stop-motion
because it's the bond between an animator and the puppet.
And normally, film captures reality.
Animation creates it and has to simulate the capture.
You give life to it, and that is the highest art form.
What's gonna make us unique is
bringing Guillermo's live-action aesthetic to this movie.
There's a sophistication of filmmaking
that when it's applied to stop-motion, which is inherently handcrafted,
you get a really powerful combination.
Pinocchio is a movie that has a huge heart.
It deals with who you are, staying true to yourself,
and not having to change to be accepted.
It also is about being a father and being a son,
learning to love your family
for who they are and how they are.
Guillermo's Pinocchio is completely surprising.
He's able to Trojan horse these really big discussions
into a really entertaining family movie.
He is always looking at what it is to be human
and what it is to join a society.
That's his territory, and Pinocchio is all about that.
It's a retelling of a story you think you do know,
but you don't know.
The outsider aspect of Pinocchio
is what attracted me to the story.
I identify with outsider creatures
like the creature of Frankenstein or Pinocchio
and having to figure out the world on your own,
that the things that you are told are not enough.
And you want to know why this is right and why this is wrong
when this feels wrong and this feels right.
To me, there is a fragility to Pinocchio being otherworldly
and people being unable to see him as a real boy
because he doesn't look like what people think a real boy should look like.
I'm a real boy!
Demon!
Witchcraft!
The magic is it's Guillermo's take on Pinocchio,
so the look of it is such a Guillermo film.
He's brought sort of the creature aspect into it
that you could only hope Guillermo would bring into Pinocchio.
But there's a real heartfelt,
sort of emotional side to the story as well.
Pinocchio!
Love hurts.
It took about 15 years to do Pinocchio,
and we had to assemble sort of the best team in stop-motion.
I call your attention to the miniature buttons.
-Yeah. -Damn, they're fine.
They are, aren't they?
We did a three-way link between London, Portland, and Guadalajara.
I have been supporting Mexican animation since the '80s,
and we wanted to have a link with Mexico.
I wanted Mexican animators animating Pinocchio and the cricket.
Main characters because that demonstrates the great artistry and technical capacity
that a Mexican studio can have in animation.
We got some of the best animators in the world,
all under the guidance of Shadowmachine.
We embarked on an amazing process to build a stop-motion team
commensurate with the vision that Guillermo had.
The depth of experience on our project was really great.
It's just tremendously exciting because,
you know, we get to be at the top of our game.
You know, we're always waiting for a script that sort of rises
to something that you want to service,
and this is one of those experiences.
The thing that immediately caught my attention
was that it didn't look like any animated film
you've ever seen before.
Guillermo's aesthetic is woven through almost every frame of this film.
There's a valuable difference between
stop-motion as an art form and digital.
We have seen a movement from stop-motion in the early days
where you had the moiré and the flicker of fur and fabric,
even the atmospheric dust on the sets,
and the imperfection of it was so gorgeous to look at
because it told you how the thing was done.
I really wanted this movie to land in a way
that had the material nature of a handmade piece of animation,
an artisanal, beautiful exercise in carving, painting, sculpting,
but it had the sophistication of movement
that research on rigs and puppetry making have taken us to.
So, you know, my role as the puppet fabrication supervisor,
it's really getting a director like Guillermo
to trust me with his image of his movie,
and then it's the practical element of
how do we turn these inanimate objects
into fully animatable puppets?
We have to plan out a lot of how it's going to move,
what it needs to do within the arc of its story.
You know, what is it going to need to be rigged on,
and how much does it weigh?
That's even a thing we have to consider.
It's a tough balance, especially when it comes to creatures,
which are certainly more cumbersome than a human character.
You've got so many fantastical, wonderful elements
that each and every one of them is hard to do,
but you have to put it together and make it work together.
It's a very long process getting a puppet ready.
You know, it might take a year
to get to where you've got a finished puppet
that everyone's happy with, and it can actually go out on stage,
and then you can animate it.
Guillermo really wanted this to be mechanical
rather than replacement.
We have both puppets in this movie.
Replacement is every mouth shape and every expression
being a transplant.
So, its every mouth shape is a separate face mask
that sits on the puppet's face.
Pinocchio is replacement because he's a wooden boy.
So, we made him act like he was made out of wood.
His face stays the same size at all times.
He doesn't have any puffy cheeks.
The wood grains in his face doesn't move around at all.
It just opens up.
I sort of described it as using a chisel to open the mouth up.
So, you just go it in one bang. There's a bit of cushion on the back end.
Bang! Open.
I think that was a stroke of genius when we all came up with that.
I was like, "Yes!"
Technically speaking, it was gonna be a really difficult puppet to create.
We had to find new techniques so that you could see the character
in all its wooden form with its crude wooden joints.
We wanted it to be as practical and as durable
as a feature film would demand of a puppet of that size.
Pinocchio himself is the first puppet
fully printed out of a 3D printer.
But then Volpe and Geppetto are all mechanical.
A mechanical animation is where you have a silicone skin
sitting over what is essentially a Swiss watch of mechanisms.
With that, the animator move frame-by-frame
every element from the outside through the skin.
It's been a long process working with the animation team
to see how we would develop the techniques used for each character.
You know, Geppetto works so well
because he's got a big mustache and a big beard and heavy eyebrows.
And all of these things lend themselves to mechanical faces.
So, when the animator started to work with the first Carlo puppet,
it was such a struggle.
The more smooth the face,
the harder it is to make those expressions change.
So, the animators started relying on the lower eyelids,
on the brows, on the body language.
And especially with Carlo,
one of the things we wanted to do was
do unnecessary gestures in animation.
This was an ambassador to that
because nobody does more unnecessary gestures than a child.
One of Guillermo's initial conceits was
really making sure that you hold on
to the realness and the tactileness of stop-motion
and the idea that you animate mistakes.
He was really stressing the realism of the performances
like little mistakes that people make all the time.
If they go to pick up a dinner plate, they maybe miss it
and go for it again.
In live-action, you beg for a mistake,
you beg for a line reading that is not what you expected.
This invoking of reality is very hard in stop-motion
because you are animating it, so you need to simulate those accidents.
Lift your leg.
Because he's a live-action director,
he understands the time it takes for people to process
faces and things on screen.
On this film, Guillermo really has taken the time to say
it needs to get slowed down.
We need to see Pinocchio thinking about that.
I said, "If the character is thinking,
I wanna see the eyes inputting the information."
"I want to see a subtle shift."
If you animate the ordinary,
you will achieve something extraordinary.
I co-directed with Mark Gustafson, who, for me, is
a legendary director and animator.
It's been amazing working with Guillermo because
he's an artist who's at the top of his game right now.
So, it makes you have to raise your game as well.
Guillermo's been fantastic in the way that he completely trusted the animator,
a bit like he trusts his actors.
Basically, the way you do a live-action is between action and cut,
the actor owns the shot.
And you make this bond with the animators,
and it gives them a lot of power to think through the puppet,
to not do an action, to avoid pantomime,
and to give us real acting.
The animators are our actors.
Animation is such an elaborate process,
and we wanted animators to own the performances.
One of the founding principles
that Guillermo and I came up with when we started this was
give the performance back to the animators as much as possible.
Part of that is them shooting these what we call LAVs, live-action videos.
Do not tell lies or your nose will grow and grow…
Most times before you do a shot as an animator,
you would go and investigate
what kind of shape this shot is gonna have,
what kind of motion, what kind of speed.
A good and quick way to do that is just film yourself.
So, the animator would turn up with
a little video of themself doing the action.
Guillermo really loved that.
Every time he sees them, he's, like, a big smile and going, "Yeah!"
"Just like that! It's great!"
Spazzatura.
Gris Grimly designed an amazing Pinocchio.
To me, the best Pinocchio I've seen because it's so simple and so beautiful.
When I started illustrating Pinocchio,
I just wanted him to be lanky and awkward
like a puppet without the strings.
Designing Pinocchio was the main character
we wanted to get down first.
Guillermo had the wonderful idea of it being almost Frankenstein-like
in that one half is finished and one is unfinished.
We made him asymmetrical
because Geppetto carves him when he's drunk.
And one of the ideas is he starts with the ear and this hair,
and he's really careful with that, and then he goes, "Ah."
And kind of finishes him quick.
-Mm.
Geppetto was the one character that we designed the most.
We layered him out on clothing.
We made it a point to make everything he was wearing ratty.
You know, he's not a guy that can afford many pairs of pants.
My son.
We have to take him to a place where he's not pleasant.
I mean, this guy drinks. This guy gets angry.
This guy doesn't understand Pinocchio.
It takes him a while to realize that
his love for this boy is much more important
than doing what is socially acceptable.
Even if he's dead, I could still book him.
How dare you, sir? Show some respect!
The main villain in Collodi's stories,
a character called Mangiafuoco,
is a very large character,
and I had a bad feeling about it. I didn't like it.
I thought it was very much a cliché.
Guillermo called whoever was working on the show at that point,
and he looked at us, and he said, "Hey, guys."
"I think our main villain is crap, and I want to change it."
And I said, "I really think this should be the guy."
"Can we make him the main antagonist?"
And that was just, "Okay. All right. We've already built the villain."
-So, what do we do?
So, what was your answer to his question?
It was one of those moments where once you see it, you can't unsee it,
and you work with the amazing team to figure it out.
There was a lot of time that was spent designing Mangiafuoco
with a huge beard, and this puppet,
we finished making him, and he's now a background character for the circus.
Go away! This is not a spectacle.
But it is!
Volpe is one of the more over-the-top characters.
He's really fun because he's kind of the devil.
He's very transactional.
He's just what's best for him.
One last detail to take care of.
Whoa!
When we were thinking about the cricket
I was thinking of a cricket that has traveled all over the world,
and lived with a sculptor and a barrister.
And I thought of the name
Sebastian J. Cricket.
That sounded so sophisticated.
Cricket was really driven by Guillermo.
He takes this character who is a little bit arrogant,
and he makes you really like him and want to follow him.
The animation on the cricket is very simple in appearance,
but that means you have to be very judicious with that.
He uses the hands a lot
to explain, to…
You know, he's very righteous.
So, he uses the hands to demand an explanation,
to accuse somebody,
to signal.
He's a character that uses his whole body as a face.
I'm not a governess, madam.
And then, you know, it's a creature design
which is a completely different thing,
and that is Guillermo's true wheelhouse.
The dogfish, Death, the sprite,
the cricket, the rabbits
all have the same unworldly blue violet skin
because they are all related.
The rabbits take the dead to the other side.
And they're an extension of Death, which is the sister of life,
which is the sprite.
The concept art was never clean or stylized.
It wasn't a very polished looking like… look to a character.
They would have dirt under their fingernails.
They would have, you know, blemishes,
and it was like he wanted every character to feel like it lived a life
before in the film.
You know, we would create a character,
uh, make a beautiful costume, you know, for Geppetto
or one of the other characters,
and you get a message back.
Guillermo's seen it.
It's gotta look dirty.
You see, you make a beautiful puppet,
but it looks like it's come straight out of the shop when you finish it.
It doesn't look like it's a character in a story.
You don't have to believe they are real people.
You have to believe in them as characters,
and we wanted to embody the form and the character into one.
We wanted to fuse them.
Volpe with his sort of demonic, horn-like wings on the hair.
The innocence of Pinocchio, his simplicity.
The sort of earthiness and beautiful old-world grace in Geppetto.
We wanted to do a labor of design that told the story.
Stridulations of My Youth by Sebastian J. Cricket.
In terms of scale,
we use different size of puppets for different needs.
This is our Pinocchio to interact with the cricket, which is this height,
Sebastian J. Cricket.
And in order for him to be the right size in very few shots,
we need the cricket and the shoulder of Pinocchio
talking to him, whispering in his ear.
So, we use this big Pinocchio.
And then in certain shots, we use this small Pinocchio.
Then we have this
small crickets
for other shots,
particularly when he gets crushed.
Oh!
The pain.
You can only build a puppet so small
and still have good control over it in terms of the animation.
So we built Pinocchio as small as we could and still
have really good control over him.
And then everybody else's scale is in relation to that.
And then the sets are in relation to that.
Everything has to be built.
That's sort of the blessing and the curse of stop-motion.
You know, you can make things look exactly as you need them to look.
I think that's exciting
because you fully create a world
and a world that's unlike any other or very much like another.
And that's kind of really powerful.
It helps you best tell the story.
So we looked at a lot of Guillermo's films and picked up key things.
Colors, textures,
shapes of windows, and just general atmosphere.
You can probably tell within three seconds that you're watching a Guillermo film,
and we wanted that to be true of this.
The sets are evocative
of the beauty of these little Italian towns,
and I know places just like this.
We did a huge amount of research.
Photographs and posters, we copied typography
because I wanted the world to feel real.
All the structures in the town
have the remnants of their origins
like medieval ruins, and then on top of that
you have 18th-century carvings,
and then you have murals that were frescoes from the 1500s, 1400s.
So, it feels layered.
Once you're translating script to storyboards,
those decisions can define how massive the vision can be,
and you can make choices in story where you put the camera,
how much the camera's moving.
One of the unique challenges that we have is
the animator has to actually be able to get in
and reach the puppets and animate.
So, we have to design these sets
so that they can be pulled apart in many different ways.
It's all a big, like, teamwork, and we're all sitting there together
talking about how this is gonna look.
The film looks a certain way,
and then the animation needs to fit into that world as well.
Early on, you have to find out the aesthetic,
like exactly what it is.
And we'll base it on something very simple.
You know, we have a pine cone in the movie that,
it's a… it's a charming little… little object,
and we looked at it over and over for months at different intervals,
and we would look at other things through the lens of
like how did we make this pine cone? We like this look.
If you know how the lines of a simple, organic pine cone works,
you start to learn the line language
and the level of detail and the level of reality
that we're trying to infuse into this movie.
You just kind of get a feel for what this world looks like.
The Death puppet left room for certain aspects to be explored.
Yeah. 'Cause I mean, I think originally the Death, we had the snake tail,
and it was you and Toby
saw that scaling as a pine cone texture. And that was so brilliant.
It was a great way of tying it into the pine cone that Death represented
every living thing.
There were some pants for Spazzatura.
And the line in the pants…
-Had to be handmade. -It had to be handmade.
But it didn't wanna be overt, you know.
It wanted to feel real in a sense,
but it sort of reflected into everything else,
this notion of it's not perfect.
It's got a character to it.
We'd all seen the sample. It had come from Mackinnon and Saunders.
They gave us a swatch board. If we can handle these stripes nine ways.
Here's ones that we like, and we were all, "That one."
And we laughed. We're like, "We all agree."
"That's so great. It must be that one."
Then the next step was to talk about well, why?
Because if you talk about why,
then maybe those rules can inform other things.
There are rules, you see.
We had to find the language of it,
how cartoony is it, how real is it.
And there was sort of a sweet spot I think we landed in.
Having a magical element like Pinocchio
required that we had a more grounded world around Pinocchio.
If everything is magical, nothing is magical.
We needed to ground the world. Proportions needed to be correct.
The physics needed to be correct.
It provided stakes for the emotional story and arc of Pinocchio.
Guillermo has a very good eye for that.
He notices when something is not going to fit into the world.
This is no different than designing
and decorating a full-size,
live-action movie set.
That's the beauty of stop-motion animation.
Set dec, set design, decoration,
cinematography, they're completely like a live-action film.
Guillermo's very concerned that things feel and look real.
And so we do reference a lot of period images if we can find them.
For example, this interior.
If you imagined that the main source of energy was coal
and wood, we stained all the walls with coal stains.
So you have to really run it not by a design machine,
but as a reality machine.
I remember one of his first visits.
He was looking at the church set
that we had just sort of barely gotten together by the time he got here,
and he was like, "Yes. We should age the hell out of this."
We started with the fact that churches took decades, if not centuries
to be completed.
So, the woodwork would be a little lighter than the frescoes on the walls,
or the stained-glass windows would be of a different decade or a century,
and the carving of the Christ took a while.
It needed to feel like the same handiwork
of all the other stuff in Geppetto's household.
You needed to feel the shaving of the wood, the shape,
which I wanted to have a parallel with Pinocchio being carved of wood
and Pinocchio has a hard time figuring out
why the townspeople hate him
if he's made of wood and they love Him,
as he says, who is also made of wood.
So, that point could only be done at the church.
My only worry on this movie was
will I have enough motion control kit
to do all the camera movement that Guillermo will expect on this movie.
Because the later Guillermo films, the camera just doesn't stop.
We wanted to stage with the characters
moving around on the camera,
moving around the way you would stage with actors on a set.
In some instances, we move the camera quite a bit.
For example, one single shot took three months.
There's a shot where Spazzatura is headed back to the carnival
where he sort of runs down, and the camera follows him
traversing the carnival grounds
and ending up in Volpe's wagon.
A shot like that, it tells you so much
'cause you really see the way that Spazzatura moves.
It tells you something about his character.
It also tells you about the environment that he's from.
It tells you about the circus.
And we also get to meet some of the other characters
who are in the background as he sort of passes through.
A lot of Guillermo's movies are hyperreality.
So, you use the light
just to accent the emotional content of a scene,
so having some cloud movement is such an assist for telling the story.
Like with Geppetto when he is chopping down the tree.
It helps to reflect Geppetto's agonized state,
so we can really amp up the drama.
One of the things which we had not done before
was when Volpe is burning Pinocchio on the fire.
We were able to have a torch with LED lights inside the torch,
so that as Volpe moves the torch around,
we were able to have a separate pass for that light
and to give it multiple exposures.
Give me that torch, Spazzatura.
Because normally, you'd always have to fake that up
with moving lights or stage,
and this was an opportunity for us
to really control that in the post process.
We could keep the moonlight separate
and just have all of that torch light and fire light
on separate passes.
You will burn. Burn bright!
Like a star!
-Ow! Help!
It's amazing how the character designs and the actors themselves
inform each other,
and then the actual animator informs it as well.
By the time that the animator gets the puppet,
the animator has the voice tracks.
The thing with Pinocchio that I love
is the idea of it embodying
any four-year-old, six-year-old that are balls of energy
-that nobody can control. -Oh!
When they're sad, you understand they're sad,
and they can be on the verge of tears one second
and incredibly happy two seconds later.
As we came to find out with Gregory,
you have a very short lifespan in the recording sessions,
but it was all true.
My process at the beginning, I was very nervous.
I've never done
anything where I was a really big, substantial part in the movie.
It was like shooting a documentary.
Whenever he started acting,
we did a little thing that…
…it was very easy for him to shake out the acting.
I said… I would say he would call me a dummy.
He said that if I said "dummy" at the end of a line,
even though we wouldn't probably put it in the final cut,
it made me put a lot more emphasis into it,
especially on some of the funnier lines.
And every time he got a little too actory,
he would say, "Shut up, dummy!"
And then he would laugh it out, and he would continue.
I'm made of flesh and bone and meaty bits.
I'm a real boy.
He's really good at being natural,
but he is incredibly intimate when he's whispering
or talking to the cricket
or talking to Candlewick.
There is an absolute pure emotion there.
Fathers feel despair, like everyone else.
And they say things they only think they mean in the moment.
But inside they love you.
Well, I think this is my third project with David Bradley,
and it's because I admire him very much.
I think he's an actor that has an easily identifiable sound.
No one talks to the Podestà like that.
I approached the script by finding some kind of vocal quality
that was believable and truthful,
but something that tells the story and it's more vivid
and more capturing
the essence of this character.
He goes high, and he goes low really fast. "Why are you saying that?"
You know, he really is…
It's almost like a musical thing he has.
A son knows when his father is alive.
He will look for us. You'll see.
You have nothing to worry about.
Easy for you to say.
I wasn't convinced of Cricket when we started the film.
Just as a character.
As soon as Ewan started voicing it, I was like, "Okay. I'm on board."
We… We made it!
I can't believe it!
I'm a massive fan of Ewan McGregor,
and when he talks, he's so relatable but warm.
And I said, "We cannot have enough of this voice."
Well, I've tried my best,
and that's the best anyone can do.
Pinocchio taught me that.
And I thought that should be the main character of the film,
the narrator character.
And we rewrote the scenes emphasizing the cricket
even if he was just watching.
I think the sessions with Ewan have been the best character voice sessions
I've ever had in my life.
I am Count Volpe. You have been chosen!
Come partake in the fun, fanciful, carefree carnival life
as the star of my puppet show.
We knew that Volpe needed to be glitzy, cosmopolitan, appealing,
sound like a man of the world.
We wanted him to have an accent,
but have a voice that could pronounce flawlessly
a word in French, a word in Italian, a word in German.
Puppets are le meilleur qui soit. The tops!
Lift your arm.
Puppets are well respected in every station of life.
The only voice that came to mind was Christoph Waltz.
Talk about a guy that can change
the rhythm and the intention of a sound in mid-phrase.
That's a dramatic function, so to say.
And I always look for the function in the story.
He really knows how to vary things
and then just punch at the right moment.
-What are you doing here?
The voice of Spazzatura, which will come as a big surprise,
was almost a blessing and an accident that I could not foresee.
We were shooting Nightmare Alley.
Cate Blanchett and I were having such a good time
that she said, "You gotta give me a part on Pinocchio."
I go, "The only part left is a monkey."
And…
And I went, "I would do anything."
"I would play a pencil in a movie for you."
And I showed her the design for Spazzatura, and she said,
"I think this is my spirit animal."
When Spazzatura gets shot out of the sky,
do you want a little .
Like in the distance.
I think there's something of Guillermo's laugh…
…that's in Spazzatura.
But I think all the characters in Guillermo's movies,
all of us feel that they're in the eye of Guillermo as the beholder.
So, I think there's probably qualities of Guillermo
in all of the characters. And Spazzatura is, yeah, case in point.
Normally, when you're watching a piece of animation
which has music in it,
you can feel the songs coming up.
It's almost like the dialogue is a ramp for the music.
Whereas the songs spring out of Guillermo's Pinocchio
completely by surprise.
Meh.
These puppets gave me the desire of not
doing an animation movie, but doing like a real live-action film.
It's the same for me 'cause they look alive.
They all look like real people.
So, I tried the music to be playing like it was a real person's.
We like to describe this not necessarily as a musical.
It's a film with musical moments.
They're not traditional musical songs, they're not pop songs.
They're just sort of what you would think of, if you think
of Alexandre and Guillermo and Mark.
All those genius minds together is something totally unique.
When Alexandre and I were talking, I thought it would be interesting
to start the movie with characters that sing
but end up…
The second half of the movie has fascist-era songs and marches.
This movie was a very long process
because, of course, the animation takes a lot of time,
but also because
Guillermo wanted me to write songs for the characters,
and a song has this capacity
in a few seconds to explain the life of a character.
They give the tone musically.
Also, they give information about who they are, where they are,
where they come from, and where they're going.
I admire Alexandre Desplat.
He is a consummate movie composer.
He does the same thing that I do with parts.
He looks at the story.
For the whole film, I've chosen to use only wood instruments.
So, you have the guitars, the mandolin,
the piano, the harp, and all the woodwinds.
The bassoons, the clarinets, the oboes, the flutes.
All these instruments are in wood
which creates a very strange environment that belongs to Pinocchio.
No!
This movie, you could watch in a double program
with Pan's and Devil's Backbone easily.
It has a lot of elements with a pure soul being tested
and coming out on the other side strong.
As I see it, you were charged with a burden.
This is a film about death.
You don't have a film about life if you don't have a film about death.
Very well then.
When we started to tackle this Pinocchio,
I knew I wanted to do my own version.
I didn't want to address just an adaptation.
I wanted to talk about things that touched me personally very deeply.
Most of my movies, one way or another, deal with me and my father,
and this is not an exception.
You watch this boy grow up, never physically changing.
But yet,
the realization that he can do far more than anyone else around him.
Now, make the most of it.
Normally, Pinocchio is about what Pinocchio learns in the world
and then becomes a good boy and therefore becomes a real boy,
and our Pinocchio is not that.
He changes everyone because he is so pure.
He changes Geppetto.
He changes the cricket.
He changes Spazzatura. He changes everyone.
And he learns who he is as a human being.
I think the film exceeded everything I wanted.
It's a movie I would've loved to have as a kid.
It's a movie I'd love to have as an adult.
It's a movie I would love to have to discuss with the family,
and the possibility of seeing it on command
after experiencing it for the first time,
it's something that creates an intimate bond
between the viewer and the film.
It certainly grows for me with every viewing,
and I hope it does that with the audience.