How Netflix's 'Pinocchio' Innovated Stop-Motion Animation | Movies Insider | Insider

[Spazzatura chattering] Narrator: This 24-second shot in "Pinocchio" took almost two months to film. Besides how smoothly the monkey Spazzatura swings, the wild expressions on his face feel almost real. Peel back the layers, and you'll find that Spazzatura's eyes and eyebrows, like the faces of most puppets in the film, were controlled by a complex system of mechanical gears.

Spazzatura was an animal that doesn't talk but needed to be very expressive. Narrator: We talked to the team behind "Pinocchio. " Turns out, these mechanical puppets are just the tip of the iceberg.

The team combined several new techniques with age-old ones to make "Pinocchio" one of the most lifelike stop-motion movies ever animated. The expressiveness of puppets like Spazzatura originates under their silicone skin, with tiny gears moved via pallets or paddles. This technique, known as mechanical stop-motion, is distinct from the older replacement method, where every new expression requires swapping out a part of the puppet, working from a limited stack of faces.

When you've got a mechanical face, you have an endless amount of movement, so you can have the face be alive at all times. Geppetto: I love you exactly as you are. Narrator: In taking a mechanical approach, "Pinocchio" built on the work of Georgina and Brian's team on the 2005 film "Corpse Bride," which pioneered the use of geared heads to create nuanced expressions.

Georgina: Mechanical heads are amazing for subtlety. I think that the "Pinocchio" puppets are probably twice as sophisticated as the "Corpse Bride" puppets. The "Corpse Bride" puppets has these ginormous, big, wide eyes, which is just a flat, hard surface where we move the little black pupil around.

The "Pinocchio" puppets has spheres in there, so real eyeballs with light hitting it. It's less cartoon. When you look into their eyes, I think you feel a little bit more for them.

Narrator: The facial acting in "Pinocchio" also benefits from the tight artistic control allowed by mechanical stop-motion. Georgina: With printed faces, they're all premade, and then there's a librarian that chooses what faces the animator is going to have for that shot. Mechanical animation, the performance is in the hand completely, onstage.

So they can put their own nuances into that character much more when they're animating the faces. Narrator: This established a more direct relationship between animator and puppet, which in turn allowed Guillermo del Toro to direct the animators as if they were live actors. But a geared silicone head wouldn't work for Pinocchio because it didn't fit the character.

Georgina: If we tried to make Pinocchio as a soft rubber puppet, it wouldn't have been believable as wood. Narrator: So they designed him as a replacement puppet. Brian: His printed face was perfect for his quite snappy mouth movement.

And he sort of pops open and pops closed again. Narrator: This different style of animation set up a nice contrast with the human characters, like Geppetto and Volpe, whose silicone faces moved more fluidly. But while Pinocchio had to look wooden, he also needed to emote, and even sing and dance.

Pinocchio: I'm a star, Papa, a star! Narrator: To make such a skinny puppet durable enough to be heavily animated throughout the film, the team built his body out of metal instead of a more typical material like resin. That's where the team drew on some 21st-century technology: 3D printing.

Another of Georgina's projects, 2009's "Coraline," pioneered this approach for parts of stop-motion puppets. Here, though, the team 3D-printed Pinocchio's entire metal body. And they did it in color, which standardized the patterns on Pinocchio's wooden surface.

Georgina: The detail of wood grain all over his body parts were integral to his design. And to try and reproduce those if we were carving them out of metal, each individual would've taken many more steps. The great thing with 3D-printing metal is that once you have modeled it, then you just press print.

And it's cleaner, and it's one whole piece of metal rather than multiple parts of metal that are either soldered together or bolted together. Narrator: They also 3D-printed his resin faces, helping each of his expressions blend in seamlessly with the next. Georgina: The wood grain literally cuts through the mouth, so any chatter of that wood grain with individual faces would've been a huge challenge.

Narrator: The tech allowed them to rapidly print 3,000 faces for the puppet, giving animators a wider library of expressions to work with. The team varied the size of the puppets according to the demands of each scene. Like this one, which used a giant Pinocchio to convey the correct sense of scale relative to Sebastian J.

Cricket. And they customized each puppet's mechanics to express its unique character design. Sometimes this meant blending mechanical and replacement techniques, like on Spazzatura.

[Spazzatura chattering] Narrator: While his eyes and brows are mechanical, his very active mouth presented a different challenge. Georgina: The scale of Spazzatura's head was so small that to get a fully articulated mechanical mouth into that puppet was literally impossible. And especially to get the expression that we wanted to get with Spazzatura.

Narrator: To create a wide range of mouth movement, it made sense to design his mouth and muzzle as 3D-printed replacement parts, especially since they didn't need too many gradations between the extremes. Brian: Because he's not having any dialogue, he was just making sounds . .

. [Spazzatura chattering] he has quite limited amount of mouth shapes. His mouth kit, the amount of faces that we needed to print to make him smooth, wasn't that many.

Narrator: They took a similar approach with Sebastian . . .

[Sebastian laughing] who was mostly mechanical, except for his eyes. Georgina: We wanted a lot of expression in the eyes. And he as a character was an exoskeleton, so mostly hard parts.

And to get all of the different expression with very bulbous eyes sitting on top of the head, we did color-printed replacement eyes for the cricket. Narrator: And they weren't afraid to go back to basics when it suited the character design. Georgina: So, when it came to the dogfish, once we'd made this huge armature, which was about 3 foot long, we then realized, well, we don't want to weigh this down with silicones and all these fancy materials that we use for these tiny heads.

So that's why we decided to go old school and use foam latex. It's a much lighter material that was manageable for the animator to move frame by frame, and it lends itself to the character that is the dogfish, sort of a sea creature that lives at the bottom, is gnarly and wrinkly. [dogfish growling] Arrivederci!

Narrator: To create more detailed movement, the rigs on the characters were engineered with precise slider and winder controls. These allowed for tiny increments of motion, helping craft fully fleshed-out performances that included not just key poses, but microgestures and brief hesitations . .

. Checkmate. Narrator: Inspired by similar moments in Hayao Miyazaki films.

Mei: Whoa, oh! Narrator: These rigs also had to be both flexible and strong to hold up to extreme body movement, like in musical numbers, and create the highly physical performances of big, heavy puppets like Count Volpe, the kind of larger-than-life villain that Guillermo del Toro movies are known for. Another signature of del Toro's live-action movies that they tried to replicate in "Pinocchio"?

The use of roving camerawork to explore new worlds. To accomplish that effect here, cinematographer Frank Passingham relied on motion-control camera systems, which let him program complex movements, so we can follow the characters through the elaborate sets, like the reeducation camp or the carnival grounds. And the use of motion control wasn't limited to the cameras.

The crew stuck entire sets on large rotators to create circular shots like this and created more movement with motorized set elements. They sometimes attached the puppets' rigs to motors, too, like to capture the swinging action in this scene. With all of this motion going on, sometimes a camera would get bumped mid-shot.

That's where visual effects would come in, helping smooth camera shifts between frames. VFX also made the world richer by extending sets and adding CG skies with changing light, colors, and clouds that played up the emotional content of the story. Digital rain and snow complemented practical weather elements, like these stop-motion beads of rain, created with drops of glycerin.

Besides these finishing touches, though, the focus was always on the handcrafted texture of the puppets, their sets, and their costumes. The team wasn't afraid to feature a lot of cloth, even though all that fabric had to be animated. Brian: It gives a better, real look to the puppets, I think, when they have scarves and the soft materials.

The "Corpse Bride" puppets, they didn't have many loose bits on them. As stop-motion reaches for the skies, I think we become braver and have many more loose things on the puppet that needs to be moved every frame. Narrator: And if there was slight movement of cloth or other textures in between frames, the VFX team could help smooth it out in post.

Or not. Brian: If fabric were moving around a little bit, we didn't obsess about it. Some of the chatter on Pinocchio's face we decided to leave in because we wanted people to see that this is a real thing that is moved every frame or every second frame by an animator.

Narrator: In the end, they achieved the lifelike quality of the film through perfectly imperfect animation and retained that handcrafted feel that makes stop-motion so special. Georgina: There was a lot of passion and love that went into it. And I think you can feel so much love coming out of the screen.

And the love was us as a team going in every day and enjoying pretty much every moment of that project. Sebastian: And the world, I believe, embraced him back.