Guillermo del Toro pays tribute to Mark Gustafson, “a legend and a friend”

The co-director of Pinocchio, who also hosted Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, has died at the age of 64.

“I admired Mark Gustafson before even meeting him”wrote Guillermo del Toro about the director specializing in stop motion animation. The artist died at the end of the week of a heart attack, his family revealed. He was known for his collaborations with great filmmakers, such as the director of The Shape of Watertherefore, who had designed with him his very dark adaptation of Pinocchio. A film for which they received a Golden Globe and an Oscar last year.

Mark Gustafson had also collaborated with Wes Anderson, with whom he had toured Fantastic Mr. Fox. He is also famous for two plasticine versions of Adventures of Mark Twain and D’Oz: an extraordinary world, filmed in the 1980s.

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“He was a pillar of stop motion animation, a true artist, continues Del Toro on his social networks. A sensitive man, full of compassion and biting humor. A legend and a friend who inspired many people around him. He died yesterday. Today we honor him, we miss him. He leaves behind a huge legacy in the field of animation, he is truly at the origin of this way of doing things with plasticine characters, he helped careers to build, talents to flourish, he was alongside countless animators. He leaves behind friends, colleagues and a historic filmography. Our prayers go out to his beloved wife, Jennifer.

He said you should never meet your heroes. I do not agree. You can’t be disappointed in someone who is that human. We all are. When we worked until the dead of night in post-production, when we took stock by Zoom between the different teams of animators during Covid or when we found ourselves stuck in the elevator of a cinema in London. .. I am happy to have met Mark, both the man and the artist. As I said, I already admired him before meeting him. I loved having the chance to share time with him, whether in the best moments or the hardest. I will always love him for that.”

Cristal des Cristal of the Annecy festival: focus on Fantastic Mr. Fox (2010)