Pinocchio In Portland; Another Reason To Visit This Summer

Portland, Oregon is a city of many names. The City of Roses, from the ubiquitousness of the flower. PDX, as in the airport abbreviation. The City of Bridges, for the many spans over the Willamette River. Basketball fans call it Rip City, after the beloved NBA Portland Trailblazers. And of course Portlandia, as in the quirky TV show.

But Portland could get a new name. Something like “The Creative City,” after the filmmakers, performers, animation specialists, artists, Nike shoe designers, boutique owners and others powering Portland with their creativity.

Portland is currently celebrating such creativity with a new exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, (PAM) Guillermo del Toro: Crafting Pinocchio. Admission to “Pinocchio” is included with PAM admission, and the rest of the museum is well worth visiting. PAM includes a good collection of modern art, including a Van Gogh or two, a Calder mobile, and my favorite, “The Little Pastry Chef,” by Chaim Soutine.

“Crafting Pinocchio” runs from June through September 17, 2023, at PAM in downtown Portland. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 10am to 5pm.

The exhibit is specifically dedicated to the massive group effort made to bring filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro’s brilliant vision of Pinocchio to Oscar-winning life, including more than 400 creators at ShadowMachine in Portland.

Del Toro has made financially and artistically successful films like Hellboy, Hellboy 2, Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, and the Oscar-winning The Shape of Water.

But as a quote from Del Toro in the exhibition reads, “No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation, and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio.” The director, known for his love of monsters and the fantastic, has said Frankenstein and Pinocchio are two sides of the same coin.

Del Toro came to Portland in June to receive the Cinema Unbound Award. It was presented at a museum gala for an upcoming new theater, PAMCUT, Portland Art Museum Center for an Untold Tomorrow. He was introduced by actor Doug Jones, the “Fishman” in The Shape of Water. Jones wryly and lovingly remarked that he’s spent much of his career performing in “rubber suits” for Del Toro.

As a child, Del Toro began drawing monsters and fantastic creatures inspired by comics and a medical encyclopedia he found in his father’s library. He also continues his habit of keeping a notebook to record ideas, lists, and images for future films.

Although Del Toro has a long Hollywood history, the road to winning the 2023 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was anything but smooth. Del Toro began developing his haunting version of Pinocchio (the film is set in a dark and stylized version of Mussolini’s Italy) almost 15 years earlier, meeting with artists in 2008. Every studio rejected Del Toro’s vision, until finally Netflix stepped up.

Funding was just the first step. “Pinocchio” is made with stop-motion animation, an intricate and detailed version of the art where objects are physically manipulated so they will appear to show independent motion when filmed.

The film required designing, building and even costuming hundreds of models of characters like Pinocchio and Geppetto, as seen in the exhibit. Meanwhile, the team needed to create miniature sets of buildings, boats and creatures like Monstro the whale simultaneously.

Working according to a schedule, through COVID, scenes would be painstakingly shot to bring the complex film to life. The 400 Portland-based workers at ShadowMachine in Portland put in over one-million-man hours working on the film, including many working at home when COVID kept them from the studio.

The exhibit shows the modified pizza boxes where creators stored dozens of slightly different Pinocchio heads with slightly different expressions. There’s a “Puppet Hospital” workbench where the magic was made, speeded-up video of artists manipulating a model over hours to create seconds of film, and more.

Del Toro’s next animation project, “The Buried Giant,” is also expected to be made in Portland.

Portland will have another outlet for filmmakers and other creative types when PAMCUT’s Tomorrow Theater opens this November. The new facility is the rebuilt 100-year-old Oregon Theater, whose last incarnation was as a porn house. At the gala, Del Toro donated several thousand dollars towards the new facility.

Creative Portland has many other outlets. Kinokuniya Portland, located in a historic cinema building not far from PAM, has a with a focus on art and comics from Japan. The store carries art and drawing supplies, books, models, Japanese stationery and more.

Also downtown is the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. One current exhibition is The Jews of Amsterdam. It has many of Rembrandts’ line drawings and sketches of Jewish life in Amsterdam from the 1600’s. It also features the contemporary paintings of Henk Pander. Born in Holland during the Nazi occupation, he witnessed he destruction of the synagogues and the disappearance of the city’s Jews. His paintings of Amsterdam show the darkened, empty windows and silent doorways of the deserted Jewish neighborhoods that Rembrandt frequented 300 years before.

The museum is also hosting But A Dream, a series of artworks by Salvador Dalí on the renewal of the Jewish people. “Aliyah, the Rebirth of Israel” is composed of 25 mixed media paintings including gouache, watercolors, and Indian ink on paper. Daii drew from both the Bible and history to create his arresting images.

On a lighter note, thrifting is another Portland creative opportunity. I strolled along Hawthorne Boulevard where many of Portland’s famed thrift stores are located. (There’s also a branch of world-famous Powell’s Bookstore.) I didn’t find gala-appropriate clothing, or the classic Nike basketball shoes I was looking for. But in the heart of Portland Trailblazers country, I found a LeBron James Lakers jersey with the price tags still on it for my son. Thrifting is treasure hunting; you’ll never know what you’ll find.

If you’re tired from a day of museums and shopping, you can get above it all at the Portland City Grill. Located on the 30^th floor of a downtown skyscraper, it offers a great view of the Willamette River and its bridges, with Mt. Hood in the distance. Go during happy hour, (4-6PM Monday to Friday) when French fries made with salt and vinegar truffles, gorgonzola cheese or bacon are $5. Premium craft beers, including many from Oregon, are only six dollars.

Once your energy is replenished, you can start thinking about visiting Oregon’s great outdoors. But that’s another story.