The Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a masterclass in stop-motion animation

With his latest movie, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, along with co-director and stop-motion animation legend Mark Gustafson, makes the case for animation as an excellent tool to tell dark, sometimes grim, stories. So, it comes as no surprise that over 245,000 visitors have been to see the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) special exhibit on the award-winning production since it opened on December 4 last year. Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio takes its wide-eyed patrons behind the scenes of the exhaustive sets of the movie and its stop-motion animation work with ceiling-mounted art, oversized puppets, alternative posters and more. Read this interview with Ronald S. Magliozzi, curator, Department of Film, MoMA.

The worlds he has created over the years are testament to his penchant for marrying the gothic and fantastical to the mundane everyday or emotions as universal as love — be it the 1960s lab housing an amphibious creature in Shape of Water or the eerie fantasy world set in 1944 Spain in  Pan’s Labyrinth.

With his latest, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature this year, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, along with co-director and stop-motion animation legend Mark Gustafson, makes the case for animation as an excellent tool to tell dark, sometimes grim, stories.

So, it comes as no surprise that over 245,000 visitors have been to see the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) special exhibit on the award-winning production since it opened on December 4 last year.  Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio takes its wide-eyed patrons behind the scenes of the exhaustive sets of the movie and its stop-motion animation work with ceiling-mounted art, oversized puppets, alternative posters and more. Edited excerpts from a conversation with Ronald S. Magliozzi, curator, Department of Film, MoMA:

The exhibition invites visitors to explore the collaborative craft of stop-motion animation filmmaking — from ‘look development’ to the ‘on-set’ process, through a presentation of five full working sets and four large set pieces, alongside puppets and marionettes, maquettes, sculptural moulds, drawings, development materials, time-lapse and motion-test videos, digital colour tests, archival photography, and props from the film.

In addition, stop-motion is visible throughout the entire exhibition in time-lapse videos and motion study recordings of animators. It is dedicated to the proposition that Guillermo has so often stated: “Animation is a medium, not a genre.”

The exhibition has had an inspirational effect, as we’d hoped it might, and is evidently encouraging new generations of animators and puppet-makers. On more than one occasion, we’ve been stopped by animation students eager to express their appreciation for the behind-the-scenes look at the particular skill it takes to produce stop-motion, and the collaborative nature of the work.

It started with an offer from Netflix in late 2021 to consider the possibility of creating an exhibition on the film. Having previously curated three popular exhibitions on animation at the Museum of Modern Art from archival holdings —  Pixar: 20 Years of Animation (2005),  Tim Burton (2009), and the  Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist’s Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets (2012) — the opportunity to organise a show during the active production of a film was something new.