After 2022’s ‘Pinocchio’ Guillermo del Toro seems to have changed his mind as to what kind of films he wants to do for the rest of his career.
Yesterday, the 58-year-old filmmaker conducted an Annecy Animated Film Festival master class and proclaimed his future to be solely dedicated to animation:
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.
Del Toro has already set up another animated film for Netflix: an adaptation of “The Buried Giant”, based on the grown-up fantasy novel by Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro.
The Mexican filmmaker also went on to criticize modern-day animation which he says has been hijacked by creatively deflated big studios:
“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.”
Del Toro criticized what he saw as the destructive tendencies in 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 fucking eyebrow, or crossing his arms, having a sassy pose — oh, I hate that shit.
He continued, “[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 fucked 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.”
About those couple of live-action movies still left for him to make, one of them will be “Frankenstein,” which he’s supposed to shoot this summer (writers strike depending).
Toro will again be working with Netflix for this long-gestating passion project, Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth and Andrew Garfield are attached to star.