It was announced after the release of Pinocchio that Guillermo del Toro would be re-teaming with Netflix for another stop-motion animated movie adaptation. That movie has now been folded into plans for a trailblazing stop-motion studio between the collaborators, Variety reports.
Netflix boss Ted Sarandos and the Frankenstein filmmaker are launching a new stop motion animation studio, conceived as a training center and “living laboratory of experimentation and research at the Gobelins (which is repped by Gotham Group).”
The new endeavor will also be a tribute to the late Mark Gustafson, esteemed animator and co-director of del Toro’s Pinocchio.
One of the films being developed for this new endeavor is an adaptation of Nobel Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel, The Buried Giant.
The novel follows an elderly Briton couple, Axl and Beatrice, living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one is able to retain long-term memories; it’s a fable about lost memories, love, revenge, and war.
That the new studio will foster new talent in the stop-motion animation space will fuel the features it produces. “The timing for this school is perfect because we can then integrate people coming in or coming out of it into that project as apprentices or people that learn the craft of creating sets or puppets,” del Toro told Variety of The Buried Giant and future productions.
“What I really love about stop motion in an educational setting is that what I learned from this man (del Toro) is that stop motion is filmmaking. It’s costume design, it’s set design, it’s lighting, it’s camera, it’s everything. Every discipline that you do to make a film, you’re doing in stop motion animation. The human touch of it is something that people see through,” Sarandos said.
Details of del Toro’s new stop-motion animation path certainly support his recent statements that the upcoming release of Frankenstein marked the end of a “cycle” in his career and he was looking to explore new terrain.
