"We are trying to get a full stop-motion version of Gris Grimly’s PINOCCHIO off the ground, with the Jim Henson Company," Del Toro breaks the news exclusively to Bloody-Disgusting. "The idea came from Gris, and everybody loves his book about it. The original story is far more perverse and spooky and semi-necrophilia vibe to it in certain aspects. Gris certainly has that vein in him, he wants to do this with that original spookiness in it, we are trying to get it going. The Jim Henson Company is the behind it and we are currently working on the screenplay! Its not coming to a screen near you any time soon, even if it were to begin today it would be about three years in the making, but we are working to make it happen. A full-scale puppet universe takes time," he jokes.

Del Toro’s working on the screenplay with Gris Grimly, who illustrated a 2002 version of “Pinocchio.” Grimly and Adam Parrish King will co-direct the film. Del Toro will exec produce.

In today’s second edition of pics from upcoming Guillermo del Toro films we have some shots from Pinocchio, which you can see below. They come from this week’s Entertainment Weekly via Dread Central.
The pics show off the visual flare we’ve come to expect from del Toro’s films.

Del Toro will co-direct Pinocchio with Mark Gustafson. The film is a stop-motion animated 3D version of Carlo Collodi’s classic tale.









http://latino-review.com/2012/06/08/...ros-pinocchio/

How would you compare your vision of the Pinocchio tale with that of the Disney version?
Well, the Disney version is one of my favorite animated movies of all time. What I’m going for is a PG-13 — more adolescent, more teenage. I hesitate to say just darker, because it’s not just darker. It is a tale that is adapted to a more complex reality, more complex ethical questions. It’s more a tale for youth than a tale for just kids.

http://insidemovies.ew.com/2012/06/0...o-pinocchio-2/

It’s more a tale for youth than a tale for just kids.

Guillermo del Toro is riding high off the acclaimed world premiere of his latest movie, “The Shape of Water,” at the Venice Film Festival, but he spent some of the press conference looking ahead at some of the other projects he’s got waiting in development. One movie is his ambitious adaptation of “Pinocchio,” which del Toro said he’s been trying to make for the last 10 years.

“Pinocchio,” as envisioned by del Toro, won’t be the charming Disney fairy tale most viewers love. The director is planning a stop-motion reimagining set during the rise of Mussolini. Del Toro admits that making an anti-fascist “Pinocchio” was always going to be a struggle to get funded, even if he already has the puppets and designs ready to go. He told reporters the following at Venice:

I’ve been looking for financing for almost ten years. We have the puppets, we have the design. I always or almost always complicate my life. None of the movies I want to do are easy. And they don’t belong to anything anyone wanted to do at that time. No one wanted to do superheroes when I did “Hellboy,” no one wanted to do monsters when I did “Pacific Rim.” When I announced “Pinocchio” I got many calls: “Yeah but it’s set during the rise of Mussolini, it’s an anti-fascist Pinocchio.” [mimes they all hung up] If you have $35 million and if you want to make a Mexican happy, here I am.

Del Toro just can’t get the funding necessary to pull off his vision, so the project will have to wait for now to be made. Perhaps the acclaim and potential awards run of “The Shape of Water” will give a studio enough of an incentive to trust del Toro’s vision. The director announced earlier this year he was bringing on “Over the Garden Wall” creator Patrick McHale to help draft the latest iteration of the screenplay. The movie would be his second foray into animation after the Netflix television series “Trollhunter.”

Guillermo del Toro is Hollywood's undisputed king of exciting projects that get announced and then discarded for one reason or another, so getting two back-to-back projects from the Oscar-winner is a dang cause for celebration. Speaking to the director about his upcoming noir Nightmare Alley, Collider's Steve Weintraub also confirmed the filmmaker's stop-motion musical Pinocchio, the Italian fantasy fable most notably adapted by Disney in 1940, will arrive on Netflix at the tail-end of 2022.

"The movie will come out last quarter of 2022," Del Toro told us. "It’s curious because it’s been almost five years since Shape of Water and now it’s going to be two movies in a row one after the other."
Guillermo del Toro on the set of Pacific Rim

Pinocchio is one of the most often-adapted fairy tales in history, between the classic Disney version, Roberto Benigni's (many) attempts, and director Robert Zemeckis' upcoming live-action take featuring Tom Hanks as Gepetto. But Del Toro promises to bring a unique, dark eye to the project, citing Mary Shelley's Frankenstein—another literary classic he almost adapted—as an inspiration. The Pan's Labyrinth director also tells us this is a deeply personal project, one he hopes will subvert the expectations audiences have for a well-tread story. Here's exactly what he said:

"It’s a very very very personal movie for me. The flip-side for me [has] always been Pinocchio and Frankenstein, are the same story. Because essentially, that’s the same story. The idea of a Pinocchio that talks about things that I consider very deep but it’s fun and it’s a musical at the same time, I find it really incredibly moving. Obviously, in animation, you get to see the movie in storyboards beginning to end many many times, and then you add the stop-motion. Right now, we are 50% animated and 50% in storyboards. Every time I watch the movie I just sob like a baby. It’s as personal as it gets, as moving as it gets. It’s unlike any version of the story you’ve ever seen. It’s completely unlike it. It subverts the moral underpinnings of the original fable, which is, in order to be a real boy you have to change. You’re going to become flesh and blood. This is about becoming a real boy by acting...acting like a real human, period."

Del Toro's Pinocchio was first announced by Netflix in 2018, with the news that newcomer Gregory Mann will be playing the title role coming shortly afterward. The project went quiet for a bit, but in 2020 it was revealed Ewan McGregor would be providing the voice for Jiminy Cricket. Shortly after that, the voice cast really began to fill out and is currently operating with an absolutely stacked lineup that includes Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Finn Wolfhard, Christoph Waltz, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, and, of course, Ron Perlman.