Guillermo del Toro wants to revive the ‘sacred’ bond between animator and puppet

polygon.com:

At a press event for Netflix’s upcoming movie Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio in London this week, I got to hold Pinocchio’s hand. In fact, I held all of him. While Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water director Guillermo del Toro took questions, the puppets for the wooden boy Pinocchio and his father and creator, Geppetto, were passed around the room, and the audience was encouraged to handle and manipulate them.

They were smaller than I expected: Geppetto stands about a foot tall, while Pinocchio was maybe 8 inches. Pinocchio is quite light, Geppetto surprisingly heavy. They’re extraordinarily detailed puppets, and handlers can move not just their joints and digits, but their facial features. I adjusted Geppetto’s eyebrows to make him look suspicious, then surprised. I feared the puppets would be delicate, but they were sturdy and easy to manipulate. It was a wonderfully tactile, personal experience.

This, del Toro said, is why he chose stop-motion animation for his version of Pinocchio, unlike the recent Disney live-action remake, which went with an all-CG lead character.Del Toro’s team, led by co-director Mark Gustafson, fought hard to avoid any kind of digital shortcut that might soften the look, or break the bond between animator and puppet.

Del Toro particularly insisted that the team use “head mechanics” — a system of tiny levers, cogs, and gears inside the puppets’ heads — to animate the puppets’ facial expressions, rather than digital replacement. Tiny screwdriver holes in the puppets’ heads operate the mouths, eyes, and other features.

“I wanted to return the controls of animation to the animators, and treat [the animators] as actors,” del Toro said. He encouraged his team to make “failed acts” — the tiny