The co-director of Pinocchio – Guillermo del Toro – is returning to animation for a crack at Kazuo Ishiguro’s celebrated fantasy tale.
It looks like Guillermo del Toro is returning to two styles of film that he harbours great affection for: stop motion animation and fantasy. The Mexican filmmaker co-directed the stop motion film Pinocchio for Netflix, which recently released to very positive reviews. It seems that del Toro himself also took great pleasure in the process of making the film, as reports emerged that he’d been chatting to Mad God creator and stop motion legend Phil Tippett about tackling a stop motion version of HP Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness, del Toro’s dream project.
Whilst it appears that Mountains might be a little further down the line, fans of del Toro’s work will be excited to learn that the filmmaker has plans to return to stop motion animation with an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel, The Buried Giant. The post-Athurian tale released in 2015, exploring a land that has spiralled into decline in the years following the end of King Arthur’s reign.
del Toro revealed his plans whilst speaking at a UK screening of Pinocchio, adding that he’s currently working on the script. “The next stop-motion film I’m making is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which I’m currently co-writing with Dennis Kelly [Matilda: The Musical], and we start the design process in two months. I’m shooting a live-action feature first. But in the meantime, we’re developing a look-book, and in about two years if everything goes well, we’ll start production.”
Ishiguro’s book certainly seems like a good fit for del Toro, with the author using fantasy tropes to explore the trauma caused by conflict, an approach that del Toro himself has employed on several of his films, including the beloved Pan’s Labyrinth. If this one does happen, we’ll likely be waiting a good few years to see it come to fruition but it’s exciting news all the same. We’ll let you know more when we next hear more.
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