Guillermo del Toro is looking to only make animated films in the future and he explains why

Director Guillermo del Toro he has made many great films throughout his career, both live-action and animated. But there will come a point in his career where he will focus only on making animated films. During a recent interview with THR, the director shared:

“There are a couple more live-action movies I’d like to do, but not many. After that, I just want to do animation. That’s the plan.”

The director obviously has a deep love and admiration for the art of animation and for the films and animated projects he has developed such as Pinocchio and its Troll hunter the series was great. He’s worked primarily in live-action, but now he’s inspired to change things.

The next stop-motion animated film he’s developing is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’S The buried giant, whose story follows an elderly British couple living in a fictional post-Arthurian England where no one can keep their memories for the long term. It has been described as “wild, suspenseful and intensely moving”. Speaking about that project, del Toro said:

“I believe you can make an adult fantasy drama with stop-motion and move people emotionally. I think stop-motion can be intravenous, it can go straight to your emotions in a way that no other medium can.

The director went on to explain that the recent surge in animated blockbusters at the box office is paving the way for more adventurous and “breaking” films in the genre. He also explained that he wants to focus his attention on animation because it is the “purest form of art”.

“The three hits of Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mario are moving things around, allowing for a little more freedom, but there are still big fights ahead. Animation to me is the purest art form, and it was kidnapped by a bunch of thugs. We have to save it. [And] I think we can make a Trojan horse in the world of animation.

He went on to lament the problems he’s seeing in animated projects these days saying he sees “destructive trends in a lot of commercial animation where characters and emotions are encoded in a sort of teenage rom-com, almost emoji-style behavior.” [If] I see a character raise their fucking eyebrow or cross their arms, with a cheeky pose – oh, I hate that shit. [Why] Does everything act like they’re in a sitcom? I think it’s emotional pornography. All the families are happy, cheeky and fast, everyone has a joke. Well my dad was boring. i was boring. Everyone in my family was boring. We had no jokes. We are all fucked. This is what I want to see animated. I would like to see real life in animation. I actually think it’s urgent. I think it’s urgent to see real life in animation.

Speaking of bringing animated characters to life in a more realistic way, he said:

“In animation, everyone is very efficient. If they sit down and get a glass of water, they do it in four motions. In real life, eight of us do it and we usually screw up. So I said: let’s make things inefficient. [I think] especially now, we need things that look like they were made by humans to recover the human spirit. I fucking hate perfection. I love things that look handmade. And stop-motion like real hand-made, hand-sculpted cinema”.

I agree 100% with him on his vision of how animation should be done. Del Toro really showed us what he could do with animation with his film Pinocchio, and it was truly incredible. The emotion he was able to bring to this classic story was incredible. I’d love to see more, and it looks like we will!

What do you think of del Toro trying to focus on making animated films?