Guillermo del Toro has made some incredible live-action films that people love, and he’s even won the Oscar for Best Picture for one of them. But more recently he has become a sort of ambassador for animation. Following the Oscar-winning success of his Pinocchio, del Toro has argued that animation has been pigeonholed too much into telling certain kinds of stories, but he thinks the format is moving in the right direction. And he credits Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as well as other recent and upcoming films, for that.
Animation is frequently seen as a medium designed for “kids' movies” and so with that, we’ve seen a lot of very similar stories being told in animated films. Del Toro's Pinocchio was certainly a more mature story than we tend to see with animation, and the director thinks that following that success (as well as Spider-Verse, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and the upcoming animated Ninja Turtles movie), now is the time to basically sneak the stories people want to tell into animation. Speaking at the Annecy animation festival (via THR) 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 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.
While Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio certainly wasn't the first movie to tell a more adult story in the world of animation, it was one of the more successful, which may have helped open the door regarding this conversation. Certainly, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is about as far from Pinocchio as one could possibly get as far as style, genre, and design, and yet both tell compelling stories, with characters that feel real, that aren’t really for kids.
When Guillermo del Toro says that he sees animation as the purest form of art, he’s really not kidding. The director told the audience that while he still has a couple of live-action movies that he’d like to make, he also wants to continue working in animation, and eventually that’s all he wants to do. He continued…
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.
There are other new movies that are stretching the old definitions of what animation can be. This weekend Pixar will release Elemental, the sort of romantic character drama that we’re used to seeing in live-action, but we’ve never seen done in animation before. There truly is no story that can’t be told in animation, and perhaps going forward we’ll start to see more of those stories told, in part thanks to the advocacy of people like Guillermo del Toro.
