“All my movies, from Cronos to Pinocchio, are a version of Frankenstein of some sort,” Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro told a sold-out crowd at the Tomorrow Theater on November 11.
Rather than try to remember how Blade II (2002) fits into that statement, I was willing to take del Toro’s word for it. (An ancient vampire denies “proper” vampire science to breed a new species of super-bloodsucker? I think that’s what happens.)
Safe to say the crowd was willing to accept whatever del Toro spoke as scripture, too. When describing how obsessed he was as a kid with Mary Shelley and the Romantics, an artistic movement from the early 19th century, he concluded, “I discovered I was a 14-year-old girl in Victorian times.”
The audience laughed before he’d even finished his sentence. Getting the reaction he likely intended (though he said it in complete sincerity), the beloved writer-director introduced his 13th and latest film—an adaptation of Shelley’s infamous 1818 novel—with confidence. To his mind, it is the best thing he’s ever done.
“I’ve been thinking about this since I was a kid,” he’d comment later in the night. In his words, Frankenstein is the culmination of a life’s work.
The room could not have been better primed to love it. After all, Portland’s animation community—and the Portland Art Museum’s Center of an Untold Tomorrow (PAM CUT) in particular—adores del Toro.
PAM CUT director Amy Dotson informed the crowd that del Toro donated thousands of dollars to the Tomorrow Theater in its infancy. He was encouraged both by the museum’s goals for cultural community in Portland and the enduring success of local stop motion studios, like Shadow Machine and Laika, driven by a commitment to, as del Toro put it, “the dignity, preservation, and exten[sion of] the life of stop motion.”
That subtext, that Portland and del Toro were symbiotically bound through a very niche kind of artistic expression, manifested as electricity that simmered through the eager crowd, which included many who’d waited before doors opened in a queue that wrapped around the block off SE Division. It took no great leaps in logic to assume that numerous people were there care of the aforementioned Shadow Machine, people who may have even contributed to the director’s Oscar-winning, Pinocchio and, as del Toro confirmed that night, could even be currently in production with the director on a new adult stop-motion-animated film, teased by the director as a “meditation on memory and regret.”
Memory, regret, how parents “pass the pain” to their children, how time is an irrevocable study in loss—these big, weighty subjects del Toro would go on to discuss in the Q&A following Frankenstein, joined by concept designer Guy Davis and visual effects supervisor Dennis Berardi as part of the theater’s Carte Blanche series.
“The Romantics were basically iconoclastic punks,” del Toro declared right before the film started. I could sense everyone in the room believing him whole-heartedly, whether we knew what he meant or not. The anticipation for his potential magnum opus, and ambient love for the director, was infectious.
One might say the audience’s chains were sufficiently yanked, much like the shackles imprisoning the Creature (Jacob Elordi) in the basement of the abandoned church-like water filtration plant where Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) first brought him to life.
Del Toro’s film, which twists Shelley’s story into a tale of familial punishment, is currently on Netflix, allowing you to pause the film if you need to pee or catch yourself nodding off. But on the Tomorrow Theater’s exquisitely sizable and expensive screen, Frankenstein was a visually impressive feat, as much immersive and tactile and weighed—with a broad variety of fluids—as it is an indulgent weaving of CGI and massive practical sets.
In fact, del Toro and Davis spent much of the Q&A detailing the huge undertaking of conceiving the film’s many lavish sets. They especially focused on the Royal Danish Navy ship, which serves as the setting for Frankenstein’s narrative-framing conceit, bringing Victor and his monster together on the arctic tundra, at the edge of the world, to each tell their side of the story.
“We built a ship for real,” del Toro proudly revealed. When Elordi’s Creature rocks the ship free of the ice floe in which it’s been trapped, the crew used a giant motorized platform to tip the ship at a sharp angle and topple every actor on board.
Even Frankenstein’s ersatz castle was first a hyper-detailed 1/12th-scale model, at least according to Berardi, who’s led special effects for everything from Fight Club and Tron: Legacy (fully CGI Jeff Bridges doing digital jazz, man) to del Toro’s Crimson Peak, The Shape of Water, and Nightmare Alley. (If the Carte Blanche series afforded the audience time for questions, I would have absolutely asked Berardi about the opening eight-minute reversed, slow-mo’d sequence of Resident Evil: Retribution or the map-into-aerial-view transition shot from The Empty Man.)
Though open about his spiritual affection for Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein (1931) and the Universal monsters—“Grandma got Jesus; I got Boris”—del Toro’s interpretation of Victor Frankenstein’s creation, and therefore of Shelley’s novel, is steeped in psychosexual symbolism. Victor is a mama’s boy who was broken by his domineering father; the Creature inherits that brokenness. The supposed monster is a large child sublimating the pain of creation and abandonment against a sprawling tableau of gruesome violence and otherworldly melodrama, embodied by the towering Elordi, who del Toro praised simply by saying, “Six feet, six [inches], beauty and wisdom.”
Ultimately, del Toro admitted he’s spent his whole life grappling with Shelley’s story, finally realizing, as he explained to the audience, “I’m the Creature; I am also Victor.” The film is, in other words, about “the kind of guy who marries his mother and drinks milk.”
He continued more seriously, “When my mother died, right before before Pinocchio opened, a chunk of the universe left me…while I was making this movie, an equally large size of the universe left me.”
Del Toro didn’t shy from hyperbole, adding, “There’s a line in the movie that says, ‘Having reached the end of the world, there was no horizon left…’ That’s where I am. When you achieve a very serious enterprise to your satisfaction, then comes the morning after.”
So that’s where he is. “I am here in Portland, and I just couldn’t order uni because it was not sustainable they said. So, I’m kind of fucked up. But I’m changed.”
It’s always thrilling to hear an artist speak so optimistically about change. He spoke again of Portland, saying in the minutes before he left for the night, “It has become a really really special place. Worldwide.”
Then he encouraged animators to unionize. And finally, as if he realized there was one more thing he could add that would really get an audience of animators riled up, he expressed outrage at the rise of AI. Only films made by humans “have the power to heal things you cannot name,” he said. “I think we need that urgently right now.”
The Netflix logo loomed ominously on the screen behind him.
