This Saturday, April 15, the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) bids farewell to Pinocchio, by Guillermo del Toro, who for five months was another of the great Mexican guests at the Mecca of art, as has happened with Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, Jose Clemente Orozco, and Rufino Tamayo.
The New York museum dedicated to the Mexican filmmaker, winner of three Oscars, a tribute exhibition that shows the process of making his latest film creation, winner this year of the statuette for Best Animated Film. “Anination is a medium, not a genre”, is the phrase of Guillermo del Toro that receives the visitor.
“No art form has influenced my life and work more than animation; and with no character in history have I had such a personal and profound connection as with Pinocchio”, stated the acclaimed film director born in Guadalajara.
a world of puppets
These days, near the end, the Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio exhibition is packed with visitors to the New York venue who traditionally seek to take a selfie next to Van Gogh’s Starry Night or other works by Picasso, Dalí or Magritte, but they change course to go into the foreground with the giant Pinocchio puppet behind, which hangs from the ceiling, and try to capture Jiminy Cricket in the photo, who is peeking out from a hole next to the heart of the wooden boy.
Organized by Ron Magliozzi, MoMA’s film curator, the exhibition is spread over three rooms, making Guillermo del Toro a true protagonist of the venue and showing the entire artistic and craft process of the first stop-motion film by the Mexican director: eight sets full-scale filming made in Portland by Mexican, British and American designers; the stellar puppets of the tape, plans, scores, the molds with which the puppets were made, the thousand faces of Pinocchio with their different expressions and moods and that they transported in pizza boxes.
These and other prop details that furnish the real scenes of the filming and provide the feeling of being part of the production. The visitor can live the experience of being on the set and walking through Geppetto’s house-workshop, where the drunken old carpenter appears at the bottom of the stairs, and the wooden dummy lies inert on the work table by the window; or by the training camp of the fascist youth and the recreated Italian village with the motto “Credere, Obbedire, Combattere”, which place the viewer in the time of Benito Mussolini, among other scenarios.
The exhibition is completed by a dissection of Pinocchio’s body to appreciate how the puppet is articulated and how it works, movement tests and high-speed videos that document the complex process of stop-motion animation that brought the characters of Carlo Collodi’s tale to life. , and a diagram made by hand, probably scribbled by the filmmaker himself, the closest thing to a Greimas semiotic square, where opponents wage battle, the fundamental themes that feed the film: life, death, and resurrection; love, goodness and evil.
In short, Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio is a tribute to Del Toro and his film creation, naturally, but above all it is a recognition of human ingenuity, that of the entire technical team that gave life on set to inert characters like puppets. and Pinocchio puppets, showing that, as Del Toro said rightly, animation has reached another level.
Look at the filmmaker’s work
In the multimedia gallery that closes the show, three video essays designed by filmmaker Javier Soto, who has worked with Guillermo del Toro since El espinazo del diablo, explore the leitmotifs or parallels that Pinocchio shares with other previous works by del Toro: death , resurrection and monsters. In addition, sound editor and designer Nathan Robitaille, who worked with del Toro on The Shape of Water, created a soundscape with acoustic references to the Guadalajara filmmaker’s films.
The next stop for Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio is, from June to September, at the Portland Museum of Art, the city where the filming sets of the film were installed. We will see if the exhibition reaches Mexico in 2024. The moral of the film is that everything that is desired with true love can be achieved.
From Chronos to Pinocchio
The worlds that Guillermo del Toro has created for more than 30 years are testimony to his obsession with intertwining the gothic and the fantastic with the everyday world or with emotions as universal as love -sacrifice for love, more precisely- whether in a 1960s laboratory where an amphibian creature lives, in The Shape of Water, or the spooky fantasy world set in 1944 in Franco’s Spain, in Pan’s Labyrinth.
MoMA exhibits other film references about del Toro:
- Chronos (1992)
- The Devil’s Backbone (2001)
- Blade II (2002)
- Hellboy (2004)
- Hellboy II (2008)
- Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
- Pacific Rim (2013)
- The Shape of Water (2017)
- Alley of Lost Souls (2021)
- Pinocchio (2022)
Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio
Museum of Modern Art in New York
Until 15 April
Next stop: Portland Museum of Art
June to September
