After finding success hooking up a woman with a fish-man, Guillermo del Toro is ready for another pairing that’s honestly pretty disturbing: a lonely old man and the little boy doll he builds himself. The filmmaker has reportedly made a deal with Netflix to write, produce, and direct a stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio.
In a statement, del Toro said, “No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal”—and it shows in how long he’s been trying to get this adaptation off the ground. He first mentioned the project a decade ago and managed to get into pre-production with the Jim Henson Company in 2011, releasing a handful of concept art (the above being one piece) based on Gris Grimly’s Pinocchio take. Now that Netflix is footing the bill, production will begin in the fall.
With a script co-written with Over the Garden Wall creator Patrick McHale, del Toro is taking an unsurprisingly darker approach to the material. Like his Pan’s Labyrinth, the story will play out over a backdrop of fascism—here Benito Mussolini’s Italy of the 1930s. This Pinocchio is, in del Toro’s words, “an innocent soul with an uncaring father who gets lost in a world he cannot comprehend. He embarks on an extraordinary journey that leaves him with a deep understanding of his father and the real world.”
Fantastic Mr. Fox animation director Mark Gustafson is co-directing, so perhaps he can stop del Toro from making the donkey transformation scenes absolutely horrific.
