The two movies Guillermo del Toro called “primal experiences”
Few filmmakers have made their love of tragic monsters more patently clear than Guillermo del Toro, with the director having ticked off countless genre boxes throughout his career while simultaneously sticking with the overriding theme that’s dominated the entirety of his output.
Whether it’s the sci-fi horror of Mimic, the dark fantasy of Pan’s Labyrinth, the gothic romance of Crimson Peak, the doomed love story of The Shape of Water, twisted psychological noir Nightmare Alley, or even his forays into comic book territory through Blade II and the Hellboy movies, del Toro remains obsessed with monsters in both a figurative and literal sense.
Having recently adapted Pinocchio as a stop-motion film for Netflix – which won him the third Academy Award of his career after emerging victorious in the race for ‘Best Animated Feature’ – it goes without saying the classic animated Disney original is a film that means a great deal to del Toro on both a personal and professional level.
However, when naming it to A.Frame as one of the five features to have inspired the filmmaker he eventually became, he offered an assessment of why he can’t separate it from 1931’s seminal Frankenstein: “If I can fuse Pinocchio and Frankenstein into one, please indulge me on that,” he said. “I saw Pinocchio and Frankenstein very close to each other. I saw Pinocchio in a theatre with my mom, and a few weeks later, Frankenstein was on the TV.”
Continuing, del Toro elaborated on how his love of the Universal monsters and the puppet made into a real boy had an equal impact on his life as a youngster: “Every Sunday in Mexico, they would show Universal movies on TV. And they melded in my head. And they both felt biographical because, as a kid, I felt the world was a very scary place and that I didn’t quite fit the model that my father would’ve liked me to be.”
Del Toro also noted how he “felt Pinocchio and the creature of Frankenstein both felt really close to me,” in the way “they felt very autobiographical, and they fused in my head at a very early age”.
Calling both “primal experiences of what it is to be human”, it’s understandable why his admiration for both means they can no longer be separated in his mind. He added: “One is a man creating out of grief, and the other one is creating out of hubris, but they are both not worried with the consequences.”
From del Toro’s perspective, Pinocchio and Frankenstein carry the exact same message of “you either change the world or the world destroys you,” a theme that’s carried through virtually his entire filmography regardless of which sandbox he’s opted to play in at the time.
