Guillermo del Toro’s magical Pinocchio process video is utterly mesmerizing

Once upon a time, it seemed as if Netflix’s upcoming stop-motion Pinocchio from co-directors Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson’s might in a bit of competition with Disney’s “live-action” spin on the classic story from Robert Zeemckis. But that all changed when del Toro stopped by Netflix’s annual Tudum event to give everyone a closer look into the labor-intensive, mesmerizing, and magical process that brought his Pinocchio to life.

In the new video, which features a number of different Pinocchio scenes in the midst of production, del Toro opens up a bit about what all he wanted to bring to his take on the fairytale, and why he insisted that the bulk of its animation was done by hand.

While there’s also quite a bit of digital production involved in the film’s making, del Toro explained how the minute imperfections that come with hand-made stop motion art have a way of making stories like this feel more magical because they give you a sense of how the overall process works.

“I really wanted this movie to land in a way that had the expressiveness and the material nature of a handmade piece of animation — an artisanal, beautiful exercise in carving, painting, sculpting,” del Toro explains. “But it had the sophistication of movement that research in rigs and puppetry-making have taken us.”

Pinocchio is set to hit Netflix on December 9th.