Guillermo del Toro Is Looking to Only Make Animated Films in the Future and He Explains Why
Director Guillermo del Toro has made a lot of great films over the course of his career, both live-action and animated. But, there’s going to come a point in his career where he is only going to focus on making animated movies. During a recent interview with THR, the filmmaker shared:
“There are a couple more live-action movies I want to do but not many. After that, I only want to do animation. That’s the plan.”
The filmmaker obviously has a deep love and admiration for the art of animation and the animated films and projects that he’s developed such as Pinocchio and his Trollhunter series have been great. He’s mostly worked in live-action, but now he’s inspired to change things up.
The next stop-motion animated film that he’s developing is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, the story of which follows an elderly British couple living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one can retain their long-term memories. It’s been described as “savage, suspenseful, and intensely moving.” When talking about that project, del Toro said:
“I believe you can make an adult fantasy drama with stop-motion and move people emotionally. I think stop-motion can be intravenous, it can go straight to your emotions in a way that no other medium can.”
The filmmaker went on to explain that the recent wave of animated box-office hits are paving the way for more adventurous and “rule-breaking” films in the genre. He also explained that he wants to focus his attention on animation because it’s the “purest form of art.”
“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. 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.”
He went on to rant about the issues that he’s seeing in animated projects these days saying that he sees “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 f**king 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 f **ked 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.”
When talking about bringing animated characters to life in a more lifelike way, he said:
“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 f**k 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 f **king hate perfection. I love things that look handmade. And stop-motion as true handmade, hand-carved cinema.”
I 100% agree with him on his vision for how animation should be done. Del Toro really showed us what he could do with animation with his Pinocchio movie, and it was pretty incredible. The emotion that he managed to bring to this classic story was incredible. I’d love to see more of that, and it looks like we will!
What do you think about Del Toro looking to put his focus into making animated films?