If you loved Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio there’s currently a special exhibition Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio devoted to the process behind the Golden Globe-winning stop-motion animation film is now on view at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (open through April 15, 2023).
This insightful exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look at the handcrafted creative process to deeper comprehend del Toro’s first stop-motion animation film. It unveils plenty of amazing secrets that moviegoers might question while watching the film. For instance, how to film an eleven-inch Pinocchio puppet whose companion is a cricket less than one inch tall, or how many pine needles need to be individually placed by hand on a 3D-printed form of Pinocchio’s growing nose. 

Crafting Pinocchio explores the collaborative art of stop-motion animation filmmaking with a presentation of five full working sets and four large pieces, alongside puppets and marionettes, maquettes, sculptural molds, drawings, development materials, time-lapse and motion-test videos, digital color tests, archival photography, and props from the film.
“No art has influenced my life and my work more than animation, and no single character in history has as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio,” del Toro says in n his foreword to Gina McIntyre’s book A Timeless Tale Told Anew. “My life has been supported by two essential myths: Frankenstein and Pinocchio. Both are father-son stories. Both are about oddities learning to navigate the ways of the works in search of their own humanity.”

For the film director, animation is a medium fully capable of engaging people of all ages and not exclusively children. This idea inspired del Toro’s first work in stop-motion, one of cinema’s oldest art forms, first introduced in 1898’s The Humpty Dumpty Circus, a short film directed by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith.
With stop-motion, an animator slightly moves a puppet or an object, shoots a still image, then repeats those steps, over and over again, until enough still images have been recorded to convey movement when viewed sequentially.
Those who loved the 1883’s folktale The Adventure of Pinocchio by the Italian writer Carlo Collodi know that it has been published in countless editions (242 in Italian alone), translated into more than 135 languages, and illustrated repeatedly for generations of readers and moviegoers.

The Exhibition at MoMA opens with a scene-setting display of three classical and contemporary editions of Collodi’s book, including the 2002 edition illustrated by Gris Grimly, which actually inspired del Toro. Setting his adaptation in Fascist-era Italy, the Golden Globe winning filmmaker connects this classic story about a wooden boy in the adult world with themes central to all his work: youth and maturity, authority and disobedience, aloneness, and spirituality.
The first section of the exhibition is titled Look Development and highlights the creative process that occurs before shooting begins on a film. Artists and craftspeople spend many months experimenting with the different mediums and methods required to visualize what is described in the script, storyboard, and concept art.


Look Development gallery includes historical and topographical models for Pinocchio’s village, examples of the film’s look-development team’s exploration of the natural elements that compose Pinocchio’s world including wood, stone, metal, foliage, and light, and several archival photographs used as references to ground the animation in historical reality.
Archival photography was an important source for the considerable historical research that went into creating the look of Mussolini’s Italy. “Even the most stylized building in the movie, the Fascist recruitment and training center, which has a huge M at the entrance, was based on a photograph of a real place,” – del Toro explains.
A puppet begins with a design. After its shape, features, and scale are explored, a maquette (a preliminary model) is crafted, enabling the film’s creative team to see the design in three dimensions and at full scale and to adjust them if necessary. From there, the technical elements are developed. For example, armature specialists engineer the mechanical insides of the puppet – a complex system of miniature gears, wires, and paddles – required for an animator to move it. Finally, the armature is padded with foam, finished with silicone, painted, and costumed. “We wanted the sets and the characters to feel beautiful, sculpted, and old-world,’ del Toro explains. “This is a movie that emphasizes the fact that it’s handmade.”
Organized by medium, the puppets in this section include examples from many stages of the process: finished hero puppets, clay sculptures, molds, miniatures, foam-core stand-ins, and more.
Most of the puppets created for the film were made of silicone and manually animated, but Pinocchio – who never becomes a flesh-and-blood boy in this version of the story – was 3D printed in resin and steel, so that he looks and feels like the solid object he is.

In a process known as replacement animation, approximately nine hundred printed faces with interchangeable eyes and noses gave the animators a vast range of expressions for Pinocchio.

The second section is titled On the Set and includes five working sets – Geppetto’s workshop, the carnival stage, the ocean cliffside, the doctor’s house, and a war-games campground – demonstrating the nuances of puppet staging, lighting, and camera movement.
Between January and August 2022, a day of production on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio involved as many as thirty-eight animation units shooting different scenes on as many as fifty-five sets. Such units at various points in a scene could comprise the director, an animator and animation supervisor, facial animators, animation riggers, assistant directors, electricians, grips, set dressers, and puppet doctors. Photographs of the 375 crew members from Shadow Machine in Portland, Oregon; Taller del Chucho in Guadalajara, Mexico; and Mackinnon & Saunders in Altrincham, England, all of whom worked together under del Toro’s direction to bring the reimagined classic to life, are also on display.