Guillermo del Toro has a nasty habit of announcing or hinting at many, many more projects than he'll ever actually have time to accomplish. Though he's finally now in production on the "giant fucking robots vs. giant fucking monsters" movie Pacific Rim that he promised for years, projects he's left behind or stopped mentioning include At the Mountains of Madness, a third Hellboy movie, and of course The Hobbit, which Guillermo del Toro dropped out of directing and is now being shepherd by Peter Jackson.
But del Toro has a pretty strong track record as a producer, helping shepherd last year's Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, and with feature films like Mama and Alma coming from newcomer directors who del Toro shepherded. And now one film that was intended a producing effort for del Toro has turned into something much bigger, and another project to add to his directing resume. Variety reports that del Toro will co-director Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, a stop-motion animated take on the classic fairy tale that was originally intended as a co-directing effort for Gris Grimly and Mark Gustafson, based on a story by del Toro and Matthew Robbins. At the time we wrote that del Toro had initially planned to direct but had to move on to Mountains of Madness; with that project dead and Pacific Rim ready to wrap up, he's come back full-circle to sitting in the director's chair alongside Gustafson.
Shooting isn't set to begin until next summer, which should give him plenty of time to wrap up Pacific Rim in time for its July 12 release date next year. Del Toro told Variety that he plans to set Pinocchio in Italy in the period between World War I and World War II, "when everyone was behaving like a puppet, except for puppets." That combination of explicit political references and a classic fairy tale ought to remind everyone of Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro's masterpiece from 2006, in which he combined childish escapism with the brutal Fascist politics of Spain at the time. As excited as I am for Pacific Rim, something closer to the Pan's Labyrinth mold might be even more fascinating to see.
