After the triumph of ‘Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Pinocchio’, including the Oscar for Best Animated Film, it is hard to believe that it is the first animated film in his filmography. The Mexican director said that he could have directed one before, if it weren’t for the intervention of a scatological thief.
“They smashed every puppet”
An icon of fantasy and terror, with modern classics such as ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’, ‘Hellboy’ or ‘Blade 2’, it was not until 2022 that Guillermo del Toro made his first animated film. However, things could have been very different. Before debuting in the feature film with ‘Cronos’, del Toro was preparing a stop-motion animated film in the 90s:
I started with animation. My first projects with Super 8 were animation. I had an animation and effects company for 15 years. We made ads. I started the stop-motion movement in my city. I taught how to do stop-motion and was preparing a stop-motion film before ‘Cronos’.
Del Toro had everything ready to make the leap with a stop-motion animated film. However, the project went awry when he returned one night to find that all the material was destroyed and that, not content with that, the thieves had defecated on the floor:
My brother, my girlfriend at the time, and I made 120 clay puppets. We build the sets. One night, we went to dinner and then to the movies. When we returned, our house had been robbed. They smashed every puppet and shitted and pissed on the floor. It was three years’ work. I turned around and said to myself, “I’m going to do ‘Cronos.’ I’m going to do a live action movie.”
The filmmaker was devastated by that event and It would take more than 20 years for him to come to terms with the idea of making a fully animated film.. “Since then, I’ve taken a deliberate detour back into animation,” she says.
Even so, this film has always been linked to his career in one way or another. Whether directing and producing the different animated series of ‘Trollhunters’ on Netflix or some specific scenes from his movies for which he used a considerable amount of CGI, as he himself points out: “If you’ve seen ‘Pacific Rim, you’ve seen 45 minutes of animation directed by me'”.
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