Guillermo del Toro has made some incredible live-action films that people love, and he’s even won the Oscar for Best Picture for one of them. But more recently he has become a sort of ambassador for animation. Following the Oscar-winning success of his Pinocchio, del Toro has argued that animation has been pigeonholed too much into telling certain kinds of stories, but he thinks the format is moving in the right direction. And he credits Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as well as other recent and upcoming films, for that.
Animation is frequently seen as a medium designed for “kids' movies” and so with that, we’ve seen a lot of very similar stories being told in animated films. Del Toro's Pinocchio was certainly a more mature story than we tend to see with animation, and the director thinks that following that success (as well as Spider-Verse, The Super Mario Bros. Movie, and the upcoming animated Ninja Turtles movie), now is the time to basically sneak the stories people want to tell into animation. Speaking at the Annecy animation festival (via THR) del Toro said…
