While being honored with the British Film Institute Fellowship last week, Guillermo del Toro spoke about his next film: a stop-motion adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s fantasy novel The Buried Giant.
Per Deadline, del Toro described the project as a “fascinatingly difficult stop-motion movie for adults” being produced “without any concession to a family audience.”
Published in 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning book follows an elderly British couple living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one is able to retain long-term memories.
Del Toro decided the adaptation had to be told in stop-motion, like his 2022 take on Pinocchio, to protect the story’s authenticity.
“If you do a live action Pinocchio and all of a sudden a puppet walks through, it becomes uncanny valley, which is a horrible thing that doesn’t belong in the same world,” del Toro explained. “Just like if you do a live action movie about an old couple crossing a landscape full of trolls and fairies, and there are special effects and actors.”
He added: “I want all the creatures to be of the same material. It’s gonna take us years. And it’s incredibly difficult.”
Del Toro also revealed that frequent collaborator Ron Perlman will provide a voice in The Buried Giant. “He’s coming on the next movie,” the filmmaker said.
Perlman has appeared in seven of del Toro’s films: Cronos, Blade II, Hellboy, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Pacific Rim, Nightmare Alley, and Pinocchio.
Del Toro co-wrote The Buried Giant with Dennis Kelly (Matilda: The Musical, “Utopia”). Netflix is behind the production.
Before tackling the next project, del Toro is bringing Pan’s Labyrinth to Cannes today in celebration of the film’s 20th anniversary. The new 4K restoration hits theaters on October 9.
