Guillermo del Toro Talks Netflix's Trollhunters, the Power of Animation
Guillermo del Toro has produced some fascinating films in his time, and his vision is what's helped make Netflix's Trollhunters a reality. Speaking with Collider, the director discussed how the team behind the show pushed the limits of what the story could be from a visual and technical standpoint.
"When a story connects so strong, it makes a huge difference in the way … you feel validated, and you feel appreciated and received that people are connecting with the message that you had or an idea you had. We were going for things that were not safe bets at all. We created a series that was lit incredibly dark, visually, very dark, very live-action lightning, but made it unique.
"We were not lighting it like a sitcom, we were very bold and adventurous. We wanted to be very ambitious. We have an incredible amount of freedom creatively, and we kept saying, “If you give us freedom, we’ll deliver.” The audience is going to recognize how genuine and how heartfelt and real and important this series is to us. But, of course, you never know if that is completely real, but now I’m very happy that we have an occasion which we were doing also non-ironic, not post-modern, but really rousing, heartfelt, almost romantic, clean adventures for the whole family, and it connected. It was a risky enterprise, but it paid off."
Part of that attempt was to create characters that appeared real and alive, or as much as possible in the realm of animation. "We tried to, within the fantastic, we tried to emphasize the real. We did it also in the sense that one of the main antagonists in the series becomes a good guy at the end. He doesn’t become a complete good guy, but he’s a guy who changes his heart. We do it visually by lighting the series like a live-action movie, we do it in animation by making the characters … we animate the characters making mistakes. They try to close a microwave oven, they fail, they do it again and they get it. Jim tries to get a pea in his mouth and he fails. The series is full of those moments. All of that adds up to it feeling alive and not being a series dictated by comedy."
Source: Collider
