Guillermo del Toro states that he has ‘a couple more live-action movies’ he wants to do, but after that it’s animation all the way.
Guillermo del Toro has been talking about the remainder of his storied career, and the future of animation: not entirely surprisingly, it seems like the two are inextricably linked. At the Annecy Animation Festival this week, the filmmaker revealed that in the not too distant future, he plans to fully move into animation for the rest of his career.
“There are a couple more live-action movies I want to do but not many,” he told the audience in a speech that was picked up by The Hollywood Reporter. “After that, I only want to do animation. That’s the plan.”
The director already has one foot firmly in the animation camp. He won an Oscar this year for his stop motion take on Pinocchio for Netflix. He’s also currently partnering with the platform again to adapt author Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel, The Sleeping Giant, into a stop motion feature. The book ‘follows an elderly British couple living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one can retain their long-term memories.’
It’s a melancholy, dream-like novel, one that seems perfectly suited to del Toro’s sensibilities and yes, we’re very excited to see his take on it, not least because we’re long overdue a great Arthurian film. Rumours have also swirled of late that the Mexican filmmaker’s long-running passion project, an adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness is a future animation project for del Toro, following his abandonment of plans to make it in live action.
It wasn’t a complete love-in though as del Toro had some strong words to say about the current state of animation. Strap in.
“The three hits of Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mario are moving things, allowing a little more latitude, but there are still big fights to be had,” he said.
“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.”
Considering how eloquent a speaker del Toro is, those words have likely been chosen very carefully. It’s ‘corporate stupidity’ that del Toro is railing against, the reduction of animation into a simplified, codified form that only aims to be little more than the lowest common denominator.
If you want more of del Toro’s thoughts, including his take on AI, head over to the piece which has far more than we’ve covered here.
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