Collider was recently given the opportunity to participate, along with a variety of other media outlets, in a behind-the-scenes look at Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which is a stop-motion animation reinvention of Carlo Collodi’s classic tale of the little wooden marionette, magically brought to life. The film will still follow the well-known tale of the grieving woodcarver named Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley), who forms a bond with the mischievous boy made of wood called Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann), only now it’s being told with the heart and through the world view of Guillermo del Toro.

The presentation gave a thorough idea of the amount of work and the amount of people needed to do all of that work, in order to complete a stop-motion project. The creative team, including director/writer/producer Del Toro, director Mark Gustafson, production designers Guy Davis and Curt Enderle, art director Robert DeSue, director of character fabrication Georgina Hayns, animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen, and director of photography Frank Passingham, talked extensively about all aspects of the production while previewing some footage and images to provide a very clear understanding of the work that it’s taken to get this version of Pinocchio to audiences.

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Image via Netflix

Here are the highlights, including 22 things you should know about the making of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

Pinocchio has gone through a 15-year process to finally get made and released. It’s a timeless story about how precious and fragile we are as humans, and how much we need each other. And because it is such a familiar story, they wanted to include the recognizable beats, but in ways that are new and different.

Pinocchio utilizes incredible old world craftsmanship and artistry, taking size and logistics into consideration. There were real sets with trap doors for the animators to come in. One of their guiding principles was, if they could make it and actually physically produce it, then they did.

• With the creative teams that he works with, Del Toro is encouraging and inspiring, at the same time. He wants everyone to bring their talents to the table, as individuals, whether that’s on camera or behind the camera.

• Other Pinocchio stories are typically about obedience, whereas this story is about disobedience, with that being the primary factor in becoming human. It’s the difference between ideas and ideology. An idea, you construct from experience, compassion and understanding. Ideology is something that is given to you, and you are told to obey it blindly.

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Image via Netflix

• The art of Gris Grimly inspired the look of this new version. In preparing a Pinocchio book, Grimly’s Pinocchio was an unruly, undomesticated, innocent force of nature who’s curious. While the script was underway, they started working on some character concepts, taking the original design of Grimly’s and pushing it from more cartoony to a more caricatured stance, pulling back from certain angles and proportions. They wanted an unfinished feel to Pinocchio’s head and design, and wanted to simplify it to still be expressive.

• They also often look to the great masters of fine arts for inspiration. For this project, they were drawn to painters like Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, who have a realism with abstract brushstrokes.

• Once the design for Pinocchio was approved, they moved on to maquettes (working models) and sculpts of the character. That helps them understand how the character will be seen in the film, since you won’t always just be seeing him from the front. The sketch is a blueprint that they honor, but you have to fine tune the details. When you have a real object, you can put it under real lights and evaluate color, and see what happens in a daytime setting and a nighttime setting. That helps them decide on the choices for color and value.

• It’s a collaborative process to make the puppets for these movies. They make hundreds of puppets to fill the world, and they need a character line-up before they can create the characters. They mainly used ball-and-sockets instead of hinges, for the articulation and movement of the puppets.

• Pinocchio went through a lot of iterations, but Geppetto was very straightforward and was the first approved character. His details carried over to how they designed a lot of the other characters in the film. He’s the most realistic of the characters, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Pinocchio.

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Image via Netflix

• Cricket is a more fantastical character, but they tried bringing some cricket anatomy to it, to influence how he would stand and walk. It’s a fine line between adding some of those details, but not making the character too creepy.

• Volpe is more of a caricature that they refined. Volpe started as a minor character that helped lure Pinocchio into the carnival, but over time, they realized that the character was very interesting. Late into the production, they decided to change villains, from Mangiafuoco to Volpe, and to make Volpe the head of the carnival, which shook things up and helped them embrace the character, in a new way. They had to design the rest of the costume, beyond his coat, and figure out how he would look without the coat on at all. Volpe’s look then informed the look of the carnival and helped establish the color palette.

• Once they know who the characters are, they need to know how they’ll emote. The bodies of puppets in stop-motion have a similar makeup, but there are different types of facial animation. There is replacement facial animation, mechanical facial animation, and claymation, and the majority of these characters lent themselves to head mechanics. It works a bit like a Swiss watch, sitting underneath a silicone head skin, which allows the animator to manipulate, frame by frame, to get the performances.

• For Pinocchio, they decided to use replacement faces and used 3D printing for those faces. They also went one step further to print the whole of Pinocchio’s body and skeleton, which to date, is the only puppet that has been fully printed out of a 3D printer.

• There are 24 frames in a second of film, and you can either shoot all of those frames or half of those frames, which is 12. Since the performance was most important, the decision was made not to have the animators struggle with shooting all of the frames. Whenever the film allowed it, they shot on twos. The film magic is made on tabletops.

• They kept as much of the effects animation on stage as possible, as long as they could control them, so that they looked sophisticated and nice, and not like a school project. They didn’t do any rain, apart from droplets on the windows, or mist or smoke because they didn’t think they could do that up to the standard, so those were visual effects. They were working in different scales, so because Cricket is tiny, the rain droplets would be bigger than normal, and they could control those on set.

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Image via Netflix

• Pinocchio starts out in the story, as if he’s a clumsy and naive 10-year-old, completely new to the world, and then ages as if he’s a 14-year-old, who understands and has ideas about what his place in the world is. The quest for an actor to voice Pinocchio was a major search. Ten-year-old Gregory Mann was a revelation, who was relatively inexperienced, but he had such a genuine quality that stood out above everyone else that they looked at. He was so natural that they immediately knew he was their Pinocchio.

• The character of Pinocchio is built out of wood, so the rest of the wood in the world couldn’t be as interesting as Pinocchio. They struggled with how to make the wood in the rest of the world different, so that he could continue to stand out.

• The acting in this stop-motion film is naturalist, with a lot of micro-gestures from the actors. They wanted to incorporate throwaway gestures, and have them itch, have times that they’re weakened, have them be tired, and have failed acts, like it taking three tries to close a door. The character of Pinocchio is the most fantastical element in the film.

• They kept a bible of animation, which included the following rules – try to animate mistakes, animate failed acts, animate characters listening, animate micro-gestures, and avoid pantomime – to create a unique piece of stop-motion acting. The movie is beautiful and moving and has an incredibly warm heart, but it deals with notions and emotions and things that will take you back to the real world.

Image via Netflix

• The father-son relationship is a central theme in the story of Pinocchio. Del Toro lost his father about five years ago, which impacted the feeling of how we have each other for so previous a moment in time. Instead of Pinocchio learning to be a good boy, he now teaches everyone else about humanity.

• This movie is a companion piece. It’s the third movie in a trilogy with Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, about childhood and war.

• The movie is also full of Easter eggs and little details. If you look closely, you’ll see the Fawn from Pan’s Labyrinth in one of the windows, or you’ll notice little gestures to Devil’s Backbone. You’ll see the window from The Shape of Water in Geppetto’s workshop.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is in theaters in November and available to stream at Netflix in December.