Now just weeks away from the 95th Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio has won its biggest award yet. Saturday night, the stop-motion feature won the feature prize at the 50th Annie Awards, the top award at the most prominent awards gala for animated filmmakers. Coincidentally enough, del Toro himself accepted the award just moments after he accepted another at the PGA Awards, where he won a prize for the same film.
“Can I say this? I wanted the f-cking Annie so much. It’s the most gorgeous thing in the world!” del Toro said in his acceptance speech “What I can say is about Pinocchio is that it was done by artists, and the animators were treated like cast and not technicians.”
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The film is also nominated for Best Animated Features at the Oscars on March 12th. There, it will take on Marcel the Shell With Shoes On, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, The Sea Beast, and Turning Red. Most insiders would suggest Pinocchio’s Annies win all but guarantees an Oscars victory as well, though some now say A24’s Marcel could be gaining ground given it’s Best Indie Feature at the same awards ceremony Saturday.
Pinocchio has been receiving rave reviews from anyone who’s seen it, including Doctor Strange helmer Scott Derrickson.
“Just saw @RealGDT’s Pinocchio. Visually astonishing, dense with beautifully complex ideas about moral goodness, and an emotional ending that is truly sublime,” Derrickson tweeted last October. “Guillermo’s PINOCCHIO is a masterpiece. Beautiful, surreal, brilliant. The last 5 minutes wrecked me. A wonderful meditation on love, mortality, and, as is common in Guillermo’s work, being loved for who you are. Will be paired annually with FANTASTIC MR. FOX. A true delight,” Derrickson’s longtime collaborator and writer, C. Robert Cargill, added.
Pinocchio is del Toro’s first animated feature and stars Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, the cricket who lives in Pinocchio’s wooden heart and serves as the film’s storyteller. Del Toro teams with the Jim Henson Company and ShadowMachine on the stop-motion animation take on Carlo Collodi’s novel, which follows a puppet boy who comes to life. With McGregor, the voice cast also includes David Bradley as Geppetto, Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, and Burn Gorman, with Christoph Waltz and Tilda Swinton.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is now streaming on Netflix.
