GUILLERMO DEL TORO:

3 milestones in the career of the Mexican director who won the Golden Globe again for “Pinocchio”

“I’m mexican”. That was the answer that film director Guillermo del Toro gave when asked in 2018 about how he achieved the balance to see “the darkness of the human being and turn it into stories of horror and fantasy and at the same time be a happy and loving person.”

“I am Mexican. Nobody loves life more than Mexicans because we are very aware of death,” Del Toro responded. And perhaps this is the best definition of the 58-year-old director, born in Guadalajara, who on Tuesday won the Best Animated Film award at the Golden Globes thanks to his magical version of the Italian story Pinocchio

The film, made with the technique of “stop-motion”, it beat out favorites like “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” Marcel the Shell with Shoes On and Pixar’s Turning Red.

“It’s been a great year for cinema of all sizes. A year of big changes, of ambitious movies and intimate movies, and therefore it’s been a great year for animation because animation is cinema,” del Toro said. when collecting the award.

PINOCCHIO

Guillermo del Toro has said it on several occasions: Pinocchio is the “most personal” film he has made so far.

Although far from the theater of horror, the Mexican director continues in the line of narrating death, a subject that he has dealt with in other films.

And in this beautiful adaptation of Italian writer Carlo Collodi’s story about a wooden puppet who gets into a lot of trouble in search of himself, Guillermo del Toro puts all his experience at the service of fantasy, adventure storytelling and his vision. about the end of our road.

“It was fundamental that life and death were sisters and had a dialogue through Pinocchio,” the director said in an interview.

THE PAN’S LABYRINTH

Fantasy, one of the unmistakable hallmarks that Guillermo del Toro has explored in his cinema in dozens of films such as Hellboy or even his debut film “The Devil’s Backbone”, has its moment of glory in “Pan’s Labyrinth”.

Considered by critics to be del Toro’s masterpiece, the 2006 film is a dark fairy tale set in Franco’s Spain, where in a rural area of northern Spain a girl, played by Ivana Baquero, turns to the world of imagination to escape the horror that surrounds it.

And for del Toro, escaping the horror of reality did not mean traveling to a “sweetened” world.

“I have about 200 volumes of fairy tales that I have collected since I was a child. I realized that now the tales are very sweetened, very homogenized, and I wanted to recover the dark vision and the violent and tragic aspect of fairy tales” the director told the BBC.

THE SHAPE OF WATER

There are movies that boost a director’s career, and there are others that enthrone them.

In the case of Del Toro, “The Shape of Water”, from 2017, became his consecration moment.

Which was nominated for an Oscar.

The film, which was based on the horror films of the golden age of American cinema, tells the story of Elisa, a mute woman who works in a laboratory and ends up falling in love with an “amphibian man” who is being studied in said place.

“The Shape of Water’ is the product of a personal and professional crisis, which, in the case of directors, is almost the same,” Del Toro said of this story.