Narrator: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio brought together artisans from across the globe. The main characters were built by Mackinnon and Saunders in the United Kingdom. In the United States, Shadow Machine produced the creatures and more than 100 background characters. A team in Mexico produced additional characters.
Puppet Maker, Peter Saunders: Creating a character like Geppetto can take months.
Puppet Production Manager, Jennifer Hammontree: To build a human armature for a hero puppet, we take about three to four weeks. We take another week to cast the foam and silicone over it. If we’re going to see the body parts at all, we have to paint those just like a makeup artist. The head mechanics are complicated and those took six months plus to build. Costume-wise, we take about a month to a month and a half, sometimes longer. This includes research time, dying fabrics, selecting fabrics.
Peter Saunders: With Geppetto, one of the things that Guillermo thought would be a nice little characterization would be that if Geppetto’s feet could be loose in the clogs. And so one of our armature makers tried all manner of different little mechanical devices that would allow Geppetto’s foot to kind of raise up and down in the clog.
Production Supervisor, Georgina Hayns: We’ve got to make these puppets look like they’re worn-in as characters.
Geppetto—he’s a workman, he’s worked all of his life. He’s in his older years so he is going to have fingernails like a puppet maker. We all referenced our own fingers for Geppetto, but we looked up woodworker hands. We got lots of reference images of how gnarly hands get when you’re older and you’re a woodworker. So we do reference a lot of real life photography and historical photography for all of our characters.