Guillermo del Toro reveals his upcoming re-imagining of Pinocchio will debut on Netflix in 2022. The award-winning filmmaker, known for Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, announced the project as far back as 2008. Suffering setbacks due to financing and studio changes, Netflix eventually picked up the film in 2018. Production on the animation reportedly began in January 2020, filming in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Portland, Oregon.
In conversation with Collider, del Toro provided a fresh update on the progress of the upcoming title. “The movie will come out last quarter of 2022,” he revealed, adding that the release would mark five years since the debut of his acclaimed fantasy romance, The Shape of Water. Promising that the film was would be “unlike any version of the story you’ve ever seen” and comparing his iteration to Frankenstein, del Toro confessed that the picture was “very personal” to him. Check out his full comments below:
“The movie will come out last quarter of 2022. It’s curious because it’s been almost five years since Shape of Water and now it’s going to be two movies in a row one after the other.”
“It’s a very very very personal movie for me. The flip-side for me [has] always been Pinocchio and Frankenstein, are the same story. Because essentially, that’s the same story. The idea of a Pinocchio that talks about things that I consider very deep but it’s fun and it’s a musical at the same time, I find it really incredibly moving. Obviously, in animation, you get to see the movie in storyboards beginning to end many many times, and then you add the stop-motion. Right now, we are 50% animated and 50% in storyboards. Every time I watch the movie I just sob like a baby. It’s as personal as it gets, as moving as it gets. It’s unlike any version of the story you’ve ever seen. It’s completely unlike it. It subverts the moral underpinnings of the original fable, which is, in order to be a real boy you have to change. You’re going to become flesh and blood. This is about becoming a real boy by acting…acting like a real human, period.”
Touted as stop-motion animation, del Toro’s Pinocchio will reportedly take a darker approach to the classic Italian tale by Carlo Collodi. In 2020 the film secured a star-studded ensemble, which includes the likes of Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Ewan McGregor as Jiminy Cricket, Tilda Swinton as the Fairy, Christoph Waltz as the Fox and the Cat, Cate Blanchett as the Dove, Finn Wolfhard as Lampwick, Ron Perlman as Mangiafuoco, and David Bradley as Geppetto. Del Toro penned the script for Pinocchio alongside Patrick McHale and is helming the project with Mark Gustafson of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
