Guillermo del Toro wants to focus mainly on animation for the rest of his career.
The Oscar-winning director has had a long, successful filmography behind him. He has made critically acclaimed movies like The Shape of Water, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Nightmare Alley, along with a few blockbusters like Pacific Rim, Blade II, and Hellboy. However, del Toro has expressed that he now wants to focus on animation.
“There are a couple more live-action movies I want to do but not many,” del Toro told the audience at the Annecy animation festival on Tuesday. “After that, I only want to do animation. That’s the plan.”
Why is Guillermo del Toro focusing on animation?
This comes off of his new successful animated Netflix film, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The stop-motion film won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. “I believe you can make an adult fantasy drama with stop-motion and move people emotionally,” said del Toro. “I think stop-motion can be intravenous, it can go straight to your emotions in a way that no other medium can.”
He has also cited the commercial success of animated films this year as potential catalysts for more ground-breaking animated movies. “The three hits of Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Mario are moving things, allowing a little more latitude, but there are still big fights to be had,” he said. “Animation to me is the purest form of art, and it’s been kidnapped by a bunch of hoodlums. We have to rescue it. [And] I think that we can Trojan-horse a lot of good shit into the animation world.”
His next movie is an animated adaptation of The Buried Giant.
