Pinocchio Animation Contest

Hosted by Netflix + Fooji
​Judged by Guillermo del Toro + Mark Gustafson
Set to Music from the Film by Alexander Desplat

The contest required animators to create and upload an original stop motion short based on Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. Inspired by the sequences in the afterlife in the film, I imagined a new universe based on the film's death color scheme. Because moths have globally symbolized death and the afterlife, I explored Pinocchio's engagement with them as a metaphor for dying. At first, he feared them because he did not understand them, but just as he does in Patrick McHale's screenplay, he learns that there is a strange beauty to mortality. If the presence of death is what means we are alive, then death is a complicated but ultimately beautiful thing. Based on the Polyphemus moth, I incorporated the eyes which appeared on Death in the film and reimagined the figure as a moth-like creature. The figures are made of cut paper with watercolors and the background is painted with acrylics.