Growing up in Guadalajara, Guillermo del Toro had two Sunday rituals — church and movies. The day began with Mass at 8, where Del Toro learned about creeds and saints and the strict rules dictating order and obedience. After breakfast, Del Toro's parents would drop him at a small theater three blocks from home where he'd absorb a more morally ambiguous world filled with, on any given Sunday, vampires and monsters and an ape man swinging through the jungle.
"Parents wouldn't stay, which was very auspicious for 'Tarzan and His Mate,'" Del Toro says of the 1934 film that starred Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan wearing what was then considered a revealing loincloth. "All the kids around the age of 12 were very taken with that movie. My mom used to say, 'You really like Tarzan!'" Del Toro laughs at the memory. "Yes, Mom, I love Tarzan!"
Del Toro usually went to the movies with his older brother, but there was one that he caught with his mother, a film that bonded the two for the rest of their lives — a rerelease of Walt Disney's 1940 animated classic, "Pinocchio." Watching the tale of a wooden puppet yearning to become a real boy, the young Del Toro lost himself in a story that contained con men and villains, wild children turning into donkeys and a desperate hero trying to rescue his father from the bowels of a whale.
