CDMX.- From its earliest stages of development more than 15 years ago, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio was conceived as a stop-motion production.
The director explained, “It was clear to me that the film needed to be done in stop-motion to depict the story of a puppet who lives in a world populated by other puppets who think they are not puppets.”
He also knew that the key cast members were to be built by British studio Mackinnon and Saunders.
“They are the best in the world,” he said in a recent video interview.
“The leading roles in the film had to be manufactured by them.”
As producer Lisa Henson commented, “They do things that other puppet makers don’t have the patience or experience to do.”
Pinocchio is the latest example of the flourishing of stop-motion animation. For decades, the technique was eclipsed by more expressive drawn animation and, later, by computer-generated imagery. But new technologies have allowed artists to create vivid performances that rival other media.
The artists and technicians at Mackinnon and Saunders pushed stop-motion technology in a whole new direction for Corpse Bride (2005) by inventing tiny gear systems that fit inside the puppets’ heads.
The animators tweaked the gears between frames to create subtle expressions: Victor, the title character’s boyfriend, could raise an eyebrow or the edge of his lip at the start of a smile. This technique also animated Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and Frankenweenie (2012).
“Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro bring us the story and then give us the space to say, ‘What can we do with these puppets? Let’s find something new,'” said Ian Mackinnon, founder of the firm.
He compared the mechanics inside the puppet heads to the components of a Swiss watch.
“Those heads aren’t much bigger than a ping-pong ball or a walnut,” he said, explaining that the animator moves the gears by putting a small tool in the character’s ear or on top of their head.
“The gears are attached to the silicone skin of the puppet, allowing the animator to create the nuances seen on a big movie screen,” he said.
For Pinocchio, which debuted on Netflix a few months after Disney released its partially animated version of the story, directed by Robert Zemeckis, most of the puppets were built at the ShadowMachine in Portland, where most of the movie was filmed.
Candlewick, the human boy Pinocchio befriends in the film, “has threads at the corners of his mouth that are attached to a double-barreled gear system,” explained Georgina Hayns, a Mackinnon and Saunders alumnus who was director of character manufacturing at shadow machine.
“If you turn the gear inside the ear clockwise, it pulls the upper thread, creating a smile. If you turn it counterclockwise, it pulls the lower thread, creating a frown It really is amazing.”
That was the result of a process that began in 2008, when the team of Mackinnon and Saunders made some of the first prototypes.
“When Netflix greenlit the movie in 2018, we were ready and waiting,” Mackinnon said.
“If we had tried to make Pinocchio 10 or 15 years ago, the technology would not have existed.”
Although mechanical heads are used for most of the film’s key characters, Pinocchio himself was animated with replacement faces. Because it has to look like it’s made of wood, it needed to have a hard surface, animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen said, explaining that 3,000 of the faces were printed.
The character is the first 3D-printed metal puppet, Hansen said. Because she is skinny, “the only way they could make her strong enough was to print the puppet in metal. He’s a strong little guy, pretty hard to break. The animators loved animating him.”
