Guillermo del Toro, Jorge R. Gutiérrez Leading Mexican Animation Tribute at Annecy

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Guillermo del Toro, Jorge R. Gutiérrez Leading Mexican Animation Tribute at Annecy

“Ahahayy!! Viva Mexico, cabrones!” With that battle cry, Academy Award-winner Guillermo del Toro announced Mexico as the Country of Honor at this year’s Annecy, France’s preeminent animation film festival.

According to organizer Pixelatl, an association dedicated to the creation and promotion of Mexico’s multimedia content, more than 250 Mexican animators and producers will descend on Annecy with nine programs scheduled.

“The Book of Life” director Jorge R. Gutiérrez, whose Netflix series “Maya and the Three” won four Emmys and an Annie, created the poster and title cards of the festival and will also be hosting a Master Class and screening of “The Book of Life.”

Del Toro’s best animated feature Oscar for his “Pinocchio” this year could not be more fortuitous and timelier for the festival, Gutiérrez observes. Aside from a special screening of “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” the maestro will also be presiding over a master class.

Reflecting on the rise of Mexican animation on the international stage, Del Toro says: “Particularly in stop motion, Mexico has been working its way into the medium stronger and stronger. My partner Rigo Mora and myself started experimenting with stop motion formally in the 1980’s and that jolted the interest of the community in my home town of Guadalajara, Mexico. A very strong contingent of stop motion animators came from that and a decade or so later, a few groups started in Mexico City and Monterrey etc. and eventually started getting recognized in festivals around the world.”

He points out that Marcel Delgado, a Mexican from Coahuila, was present at the genesis of modern stop motion, creating “King Kong” alongside Willis O’Brien. “I think this medium is natural to us – and allows films to be done with relatively smaller resources,” he says.

Today, a number of animation companies in Mexico have been successful theatrically, led by Anima Studios and the Huevocartoons franchise, founded in 2001 by the Riva Palacio family and Carlos Zepeda.

“Mexican film is better represented by dozens of brilliant animators participating in short films or lending their talents to films like ‘Spiderverse,’ ‘Pinocchio’ and productions at DreamWorks, Sony, Disney,” Del Toro says, pointing out that talents like Carlos Carrera even won the Palme d’Or in Cannes with his short film, “El Heroe.”

“We’re now more of a service industry but we’re growing into a force to reckon with internationally,” notes Jaime Jimenez, VP of content and original production, kids & family for Warner Bros. Discovery Latin America (WBD LatAm). “We have many animators working abroad but we hope more of them return to give back and share their expertise,” he adds.

WBD LatAm is also presenting Lucha Libre 2D animated series “Rey Mysterio,” a co-production with Mexican studios ¡Viva Calavera! and Mighty, and hit series “Villainous,” among other projects, at Annecy.

With more people working abroad, “we now have the first generation of experienced animation artists who are teaching at our schools,” Gutiérrez observes.

Leading the vanguard of upcoming original feature films made entirely in Mexico is the much-anticipated stop motion pic, “Frankelda and the Prince of Spooks” a co-production between Cinema Fantasma and Cartoon Network, a WBD brand.

A spin-off from the popular series “Frankelda’s Book of Spooks,” a few minutes of the feature will be shown at Annecy’s Works in Progress sidebar, says Pixelatl CEO Jose Iñesta, as will the new take on DC’s Dark Knight, “Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires,” a collaboration involving WB Animation, Particular Crowd, Mexico’s Anima Studios and “Book of Life” producer Chatrone.

“The animation industry has grown tremendously in Mexico, especially during the past few years,” notes Anima Studios’ Jose Carlos Garcia de Letona, who will be participating at a panel in Annecy. “What really sets us apart is the wealth of Mexican folklore and mythology that we can exploit in our stories,” he says, adding that Anima Studios has produced 24 animated features so far and runs studios in Mexico City and the Canary Islands.

“By shedding light on the untapped heritage of Mexico, we are uncovering hidden treasures that offer profound insights into our country’s history, identity and the contributions of its Indigenous peoples,” says Jacobo Salomón, producer of a Mexican-Brazilian-French co-production in development, “The Mark of the Jaguar” trilogy, which has been selected to participate in Meet the Producers – Gap Financing day at Annecy.

Part one of the 2-D animated trilogy, “The Mark of the Jaguar: The Awakening of Fire,” centers on Aztec warriorXilacatzin, whose dark mark on his body makes his people reject him.

Said director Victor Mayorga: “I chose this theme because there is very little known about the latest findings in archeology and anthropology about the culture of our Indigenous peoples, even in their fight against the Spanish colonizers.”

Meanwhile, Gutiérrez hopes to make his upcoming Netflix animated feature about a scrappy masked luchador dog, “I, Chihuahua,” in Mexico, with comedian Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias as producer, co-writer and lead voice talent. He has also been developing an adult-targeted series and a family series, which he also wants to make in Mexico.

The country has the infrastructure for “I, Chihuahua’s” above-average budget, but perhaps not the experience, although having some scenes of “Pinocchio” made there has “opened the doors for more major productions,” he notes.

“Annecy giving our country a big recognition was something vital that has been pursued and earned for years now and I, for one, am very thankful,” says Del Toro.

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Guillermo del Toro Hopes Animation’s Current Box Office Success Will Help More Adventurous Movies Get Made

Animation was his first love. And, if Guillermo del Toro has his way, it will be his last.

“There are a couple more live-action movies I want to do but not many,” the Pinocchio and The Shape of Water director told the audience at the Annecy animation festival on Tuesday. “After that, I only want to do animation. That’s the plan.”

Del Toro, who said he first started making “what I thought was animation” when he was 8 years old using his father’s Super 8 camera, is following up his Oscar-nominated Pinocchio with another animated feature for Netflix: an adaptation of The Buried Giant, based on the grown-up fantasy novel by Nobel Prize-winning British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. The book follows an elderly British couple living in a fictional post-Arthurian England in which no one can retain their long-term memories. Del Toro, who will produce as well as direct The Buried Giant, and is co-writing the script with Matilda the Musical writer Dennis Kelly, plans to shoot the film using the same stop-motion technique he used on Pinocchio.

“I believe you can make an adult fantasy drama with stop-motion and move people emotionally,” said Del Toro. “I think stop-motion can be intravenous, it can go straight to your emotions in a way that no other medium can.”

Del Toro said the recent string of animated box office hits, including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, could provide a window for the production of more adventurous and “rule-breaking” films in the genre. He also cited Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, which premiered at Annecy and hits theaters in August.

“The three hits of Spider-Verse, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Mario are moving things, allowing a little more latitude, but there are still big fights to be had,” he said. “Animation to me is the purest form of art, and it’s been kidnapped by a bunch of hoodlums. We have to rescue it. [And] I think that we can Trojan-horse a lot of good shit into the animation world.”

The 58-year-old filmmaker spent a good portion of his Annecy master class deriding what he sees as destructive tendencies in much commercial animation where characters and emotions are “codified into a sort of teenage rom-com, almost emoji-style behavior. [If] I see a character raising his ******* eyebrow, or crossing his arms, having a sassy pose — oh, I hate that ****. [Why] does everything act as if they’re in a sitcom? I think is emotional pornography. All the families are happy and sassy and quick, everyone has a one-liner. Well, my dad was boring. I was boring. Everybody in my family was boring. We had no one-liners. We’re all ****** up. That’s what I want to see animated. I’d would love to see real life in animation. I actually think it’s urgent. think it’s urgent to see real life in animation.”

For Pinocchio, Del Toro said he tried to make the style more lifelike by adding “unnecessary, inefficient gestures” of movement that exist in reality but rarely in animation. “In animation, everyone is very efficient. If they sit and grab a glass of water, they do it in four movements. In real life, we do it in eight and we usually kind of **** it up. So I said: Let’s make things inefficient. [I think] particularly now, we need things that look like they were made by humans to recuperate the human spirit. I ******* hate perfection. I love things that look handmade. And stop-motion as true handmade, hand-carved cinema.”

The enemy, del Toro told the audience of mainly animation students, was not artificial intelligence, but good old corporate stupidity.

“When people say they’re scared of AI, I say don’t be afraid of any intelligence: Be afraid of stupidity. Every intelligence is artificial. Stupidity is natural. Completely 100 percent natural organic. Be afraid of stability. That’s the real enemy.” Referencing studio speech, he noted: “I think when somebody calls stories ‘content,’ when somebody says ‘pipeline,’ they’re using sewage language.”

Del Toro, quite a potty mouth himself, warned students that they will have to deal with a film industry “that is geared towards grinding out **** and destroying your art.” He noted that he still gets rejected, regularly, by the studios. “They still say no to me. In the last two months, they said no to five of my projects. So it doesn’t go away. Making movies is eating a sandwich of ****. There’s always ****, just sometimes you get a little more bread with yours. The rate of productivity against your efforts will remain frustratingly difficult, and frustratingly long. And you will always encounter ********. But have faith in the stories you want to tell and wait until someone wants to buy them.”