Guillermo del Toro's The Buried Giant

Stop-motion is usually marketed as family viewing, even when it gets dark around the edges. Guillermo del Toro is saying, very plainly, that his next one is not that. At a BFI conversation in London on May 8, he described The Buried Giant as a “fascinatingly difficult” stop-motion film for adults and said it’s being made with “no concession to a family audience.” That matters because this project has existed for a while, but this is the clearest statement yet about what kind of movie it actually wants to be. ### What is this movie, exactly? It’s del Toro’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, a post-Arthurian fantasy about an elderly couple, Axl and Beatrice, moving through a Britain where long-term memory has been wiped into a kind of communal fog. The book is fantasy on the surface, but really it’s about memory, grief, violence, and the stories societies tell themselves to keep going. (deadline.com) That makes it a very del Toro object from the start. ### Why is the “for adults” part the news? Because del Toro is not just saying the tone will be darker. He’s drawing a line around the whole project. His phrasing at the BFI event was that the film makes no concession to a family audience, which is stronger than the usual “animated films can be for everyone” pitch. Basically, he’s framing stop-motion here less like a category of children’s entertainment and more like a handcrafted version of prestige fantasy drama. (deadline.com) ### Hasn’t this been announced before? Yes — Netflix and del Toro announced the adaptation in February 2023, with del Toro directing and co-writing the script with Dennis Kelly. Back then, the headline was the reunion after Pinocchio and the idea that they wanted to keep using stop-motion for complex stories. What changed this week is specificity. We now have a much clearer sense of the intended audience and the creative challenge del Toro thinks he’s taking on. (deadline.com) ### Who’s making it with him? Netflix is backing the film, and reports tied the animation work to ShadowMachine, the studio behind Pinocchio, BoJack Horseman, and Robot Chicken. That matters because adult stop-motion at feature scale is hard — expensive, slow, and brutally labor-intensive. Del Toro and Netflix also unveiled plans in 2025 for a stop-motion studio at Gobelins in France, pitched as a training ground and experimentation lab, which tells you this is bigger than one movie. (deadline.com) ### Why does stop-motion fit this story? Because The Buried Giant is about memory that feels half-erased but still physical. Stop-motion is good at exactly that tension. Everything on screen is tangible, but movement always carries a slight uncanny drag — like the world is remembering itself one frame at a time. That’s an inference, not a stated production note, but it lines up with how del Toro talks about handmade craft and with the novel’s dreamlike atmosphere. (animationmagazine.net) ### What does this mean for del Toro’s career? It extends a lane he’s been building for years. Pinocchio proved he could make stop-motion feel emotionally and politically heavy without flattening it into “adult animation” as a gimmick. Frankenstein, which Netflix has dated for November 7, 2026, shows he’s still moving between large-scale live action and deeply handcrafted world-building. (deadline.com) The Buried Giant looks like the next attempt to erase the line between those modes. ### So when will people actually see it? Not soon, at least not from anything public yet. IMDb lists the film in pre-production, and there’s no announced release date, festival berth, or cast rollout. So this week’s update is really about creative intent, not launch timing. The useful takeaway is narrower but more interesting — del Toro finally told people what kind of movie he thinks he’s making. (netflix.com) ### Bottom line? The real update is not that The Buried Giant exists. We knew that. The update is that del Toro just defined it as an unapologetically adult stop-motion fantasy for Netflix — and that makes it feel less like a side project and more like a test of how far this medium can go. (deadline.com) (imdb.com)