Chris Connor chats with puppet supervisor Georgina Hayns about Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio…
Coinciding with the release of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio release in select cinemas and on Netflix in December, we were delighted to speak with Puppet Supervisor Georgina Hayns about the inspiration behind the film’s stunning designs, how del Toro’s version took inspiration from unusual places, and how her work here differed from that of Laika Animation where she had been previously.
How did you first get involved in this space, the animation and puppet world?
Oh, wow. It’s kind of a long story. It started from being not your sort of conventional student. I wasn’t great at Maths, English and all of that. I was really good at art. I didn’t know how I would make a living by doing arts and crafts, but through weird avenues I started collecting old Victorian dolls and I decided I was going to make my own doll collection. That coincided with me going to college to study art. It was a very all very hippy and 60s, you know, fine art lectures. When I told them, I’m going to make dolls, they were horrified. To be quite honest, it was me trying to get around their negativity, I went back in the next day and went well, ‘what if I made puppets, like artistic doll making?’ That is how it all started.
I really didn’t know much about this world of puppet making, I think all I thought of was Marionette puppets. But when I started to look into puppet-making, I went to the local video store and I went to the library, and I came across The Dark Crystal and that was the first thing that made me go, oh, my goodness, they’re like puppet version of dolls. Then I kind of just went down that avenue. Then stop motion animation avenue opened up when I went to Manchester to go and study film. I was lucky that Cosgrove Hall Studios was there. They did kids TV with stop motion animation and their puppet makers became Mackinnon & Saunders. The rest is history.
How did your work on Pinocchio differ to previous films like Kubo and the Two Strings?
I would say that the biggest difference was the style of puppet making we did for Pinocchio. Guillermo had seen all those movies and to be quite honest, I don’t think Pinocchio could have happened without the work that we have done over the years at Laika, but he wanted the animators to be able to really act through the puppets and have total control over the puppets. So he went away from the replacement face technique, which is what Laika is really famous for, and asked if we could do mechanical headed puppets.
That’s where you have an articulated ball and socket, jointed and geared skull that sits inside a rubber skin. What that allows is it gives the animator ultimate control over all the facial performance. Whereas with replacement faces, that’s predetermined, the face shapes are just delivered to the animator. That was the big difference. The idea was initially to do all of the characters with mechanical animation. When we did a test with the Pinocchio character, it didn’t work because he’s a wooden boy, you know, and rubber did not look like wood. So we actually chose Pinocchio to do as a 3D replacement face. It just worked. I don’t think you ever watch the screen and think, Oh, why is that replacement? And why is that mechanical? You know, it’s very specific to who he is.
I would say that was the biggest difference. I think what was amazing about Pinocchio, is that we put all the experience that we jointly had, because there were three different puppet teams working on this film. McKinnon and Saunders in England, who speciality is mechanics, I mean, they’re brilliant puppet makers. They’re my mentors, my teachers, that’s where I worked. Then we’ve got the team at Shadow Machine in Portland, which is where we were filming. Our speciality, most of the people that came and worked with us, had come from Laika and had all that training behind them. Then we had a really small team in Guadalajara, Mexico, and they put some really interesting ideas to the table of, you know, different puppet making techniques. So, it was this amazing wealth of knowledge of puppet making that came together to make it.
How involved was Guillermo in the designing of the puppets?
Very much so. He art directed Guy Davis in the designs of the puppets and him and Guy had worked on several of his movies before. The first stage of a puppet build is sculpting in clay, so you can see what the three dimensional character is going to look like. And we were sculpting in England and in Portland. Each one of those went through several iterations of a review sort of process with Guillermo. We would sculpt and if he was on site, we would just bring him in. If he wasn’t on site, we would get Mark Gustafson the co-director to review it. When we were happy as a creative team, we would then send Guillermo photographs of all of the characters. So he was heavily involved and even on the costume designs, we were sending him the fabric suggestions and things like that.
I read that you were influenced by Norman Rockwell for the art design. Can you talk us through that?
I’ve done this in the past with some of the previous films that I’ve worked on, trying to find visual references that Guillermo liked, Mark liked, and that gave us a sort of a starting point for all of the flesh tones, which then would inform the rest of the paint job. At the same time, the art department, the art director, Rob DeSue, he was coming up with the sort of rules, like how do you draw a straight line in this movie? What is the creative ethos of the film?
We realised that through conversation with Guillermo that he was definitely drawn to a more realistic style of painting. So that’s where I’m a huge fan of Andrew Wyeth. He was someone I was drawn to, quite quickly, because he paints with quite abstract marks, but when you stand away from his canvases, it almost looks like a photograph. I felt like Guillermo would really like that style. It was interesting, because Norman Rockwell came up in those searches when I was first searching Wyeth’s work. I realised that they have a similar way of painting flesh, there’s a lot of abstract mark making in texture in there. When you stand back, and look, it does look like a real superhuman. So, we just presented it, we presented a mood board.
At the same time, Rob was realising that in the look of the movie, the phrase that we came up with was ‘perfectly imperfect’ as the style of the movie, the creative look of the movie. It’s interesting, because when you when you look at those paintings, it’s the same thing. It’s sort of almost perfect. It’s almost like a photograph. But, when you get close, it looks nothing like a photograph. There’s so each texture and line and so we presented those images, and Guillermo loved it and went, yep paint the characters in that technique.
Obviously, this story has been adapted a lot previously with Disney and others. Did you refer to any previous versions of the story?
We really didn’t go back to the Disney film because we knew right from the onset that Guillermo wanted a different take on the movie visually for our story. He definitely took from the original written book. Visually, the main influence was Gris Grimly’s adaptation. So Gris had done this illustrated book, you know, 15 or 16 years ago. He pitched that to Guillermo and when Guillermo saw Gris’ illustration of Geppetto and Pinocchio, he knew immediately that was his Pinocchio, because you know, what Gris did is he stripped Pinocchio of his Disney clothes and he turned him into an actual wooden puppet. That was definitely what Guillermo was drawn to. I think that’s why it is such a special film because it would have been so easy to just copy an idea that has already happened. We didn’t, we went our own route, with Guillermo and Mark at the helm. I think it’s a beautiful way of telling this story with a very different approach.
This has obviously been in Guillermo’s mind for some time, how early on did you get involved?
I got involved four years ago, when it was greenlit by Netflix, Mackinnon’s have been involved for 12 years. Mackinnon & Saunders are my very good friends, my dear friends. I hired them for several of the Laika movies to make stuff that we couldn’t, or we didn’t have the time to make. So, we’ve always kept a great working relationship. So I knew that it had been bubbling, but then everything had gone quiet. I’d actually left Laika and I was having a really nice nine months in the trees and nature of Oregon, traveling and things. And it was a phone call from MacKinnon & Saunders initially saying, ‘hey, can we talk to you about Pinocchio? You know, it looks like we’ve got the funding and we would love it’s going to be shot in America and we really need somebody that can oversee from Portland, because we’re going to be working on it in England, but there’s going to be a team in Portland. So that’s how it all came about four years ago.
Were there any other influences on the design?
We talked about the visual elements of painting. Because it’s set in a historical time period, in Italy, during the rise of fascism, between 1900 and the 1920s, that was our biggest inspiration. We delved deep into the actual history of that time with costumes especially trying to make sure that we got we got costumes historically correct, both in the church and in the fascist party of the time. So that was a lot of fun actually doing the research for that. I would say that we wanted that stylised realism, the ‘perfectly imperfect’. It all came from a real place in time in history.
Is there anything you’d like to tell us about Pinocchio?
I think what’s so special about this version of Pinocchio is that it’s the first stop motion puppet animated version of a story about a puppet, which is sort of magical. I think that that’s part of why this Pinocchio is so special to the viewer, because you can tell it’s a physical object that’s created that’s acting out this part. I think that really brings a magic to it.
Are you quickly able to tell us about what you’re working on next?
I’m actually working on a TV show. So, I’m staying with Shadow Machine and we’re doing a TV show and we’re excited about the future. There’s a lot of bigger projects on the horizon, but it’s a really nice change going to a show from a feature so that’s the fun of it all, mixing it up.
SEE ALSO: Read our review of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio here
Thank you for your time Georgina and congratulations on the film.
Chris Connor
