Guillermo Del Toro Teases Next Animated Feature, A Stop-Motion Adaptation Of Nobel Prize-Winning Novel ‘The Buried Giant’

Guillermo del Toro only just received his latest Oscar nomination for Pinocchio, but he’s already got his next stop-motion project in line and plans to adapt the 2015 novel The Buried Giant from Nobel-Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro.

Speaking with The Telegraph, del Toro explained, “The next stop-motion film I’m making is an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant, which I’m currently co-writing with Dennis Kelly, and we start the design process in two months.”

Del Toro is undoubtedly an incredible filmmaker in his own right, but he is also an adept recruiter and always works with top-notch collaborators. In the case of The Buried Giant, co-writer Kelly is best known for adapting Roald Dahl’s novel Matilda into the stage play Matilda the Musical, which scored a 2023 BAFTA nomination after it was adapted as a feature for Netflix. Other standout credits include tv series Pulling and Together, the latter scoring a BAFTA win in 2022.

It will likely be several years before we get a look at what del Toro has in mind for the project, as he has another live-action feature up next on his schedule. “But in the meantime,” he went on, “we’re developing a look-book, and in about two years if everything goes well, we’ll start production.”

Considering that Pinocchio took nearly two-and-a-half years to shoot, we could be nearing the end of the decade before The Buried Giant is ready for theaters, streaming, or whatever means of distribution the film receives.

The Buried Giant novel turns on an elderly British couple, Axl and Beatrice, that live in a fictional post-Arthurian England where nobody can maintain long-term memories. Unable to recall any specifics, the couple shares a vague recollection of having a son and travel to a nearby village hoping to find him, crossing paths and joining forces with several memorable characters along the way.