Although he’s been flirting around with live-action again in recent years—to the tune of three Oscar wins, and a boatload of nominations, for last year’s Frankenstein—Guillermo Del Toro has never been shy about his love of animation, and specifically stop-motion animation. This week, he opened up about his latest project in the form, an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, calling it a “fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults” that he’s making “without any concession to a family audience.”
And, to be fair, it’s not like Del Toro’s last stop-motion film was especially kiddy: His 2022 Pinocchio adaptation had some cute puppet designs, but also didn’t back away from the darkness of Carlo Collodi’s original novel. Even so, Del Toro—who was, per Deadline, talking about The Buried Giant while picking up a lifetime achievement award from the British Film Institute this week—emphasized that he expects this next project to be grueling, from both an emotional and technological point of view. (The original book is a decidedly dark fantasy, as an old couple living in a post-Arthurian world suffers from a memory loss that afflicts them and everyone they know, eventually embarking on a journey to find a son they only barely remember having.)
Among other things, Del Toro emphasized why he feels animation (which he’s previously said has been “kidnapped by a bunch of hoodlums” in the mainstream studio system) is necessary for stories like this. “If you do a live action Pinocchio and all of a sudden a puppet walks through it becomes uncanny valley, which is a horrible thing that doesn’t belong in the same world,” Del Toro asserted. “Just like if you do a live action movie about an old couple crossing a landscape full of trolls and fairies, and there are special effects and actors. I want all the creatures to be of the same material. It’s gonna take us years. And it’s incredibly difficult.”
The Buried Giant is reportedly still set up at Netflix, who are Del Toro’s long-time collaborators at this point. When news of the film first broke last October, it came alongside reports that the streamer was starting a new stop-motion studio specifically to support Del Toro and other animators’ dreams, which will now presumably be put to a pretty hefty test.