“In some ways, I never had to grow up—I’m able to just play with toys,” Mark Gustafson, a Portland native and stop-motion animator who’s worked in the medium for nearly 40 years, told Portland Monthly last fall. “As I walk onto these sets with all these puppets and miniatures, I always tell myself, ‘Think of what 12-year-old you would think when he saw you standing here right now.’ He’d think, ‘Yep, you made it.’”

Many, many toys were played with in the making of Pinocchio, the 2022 stop-motion film created by codirector Guillermo del Toro, Gustafson, and their cohorts at Northwest Portland animation studio ShadowMachine. The production ran a peak of 60 concurrent animation units across nearly 75,000 square feet of warehouse space, where the artists burned through one million combined hours of labor. In March 2023, the film beat out the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. And now, from June until September, 12-year-olds of all ages can dive into the magic for themselves via an expansive new exhibit at the Portland Art Museum.

The show, titled Crafting Pinocchio, first opened at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art last December, to coincide with the film’s release. It spanned four floors of gallery space, treating patrons to key settings (Geppetto’s workshop, a Fascist reeducation camp) and hundreds of wonkish tidbits about character construction (for example, vegetables cast in resin inspired the dogfish that swallows Pinocchio and company). The curatorial strategy was volume: one whole wall displayed a grid of character masks that covered Pinocchio’s every smile, frown, and vowel sound; placards running nearly to the floor highlighted iterations of every sprite’s wing and forest-floor pine cone. 

When the show comes to Portland, it will get smaller. Just kidding. It will grow. “We’re pulling the curtain back in a different way,” says Amy Dotson, PAM’s curator of film and new media and the director of PAM CUT (née NW Film Center). In a layout that will encompass 8,000 square feet of unbroken gallery space, the Portland version of Crafting Pinocchio will display all the pieces from the MoMA show, plus several that never left the West Coast. Curators will recreate the desks of the film’s set builders and character designers—coffee mugs and all—with on-site filing cabinets stuffed full of puppets for patrons to peruse. A pristine church set from the MoMA show will be here, and so will its bombed-out remains after it survives a World War I attack. 

The intended effect is a little scrappier and more hands-on than things were in New York. “We’re really pointing out the artists and craftsfolk that helped this come to life, the vast majority of whom are working in Portland right now, down the street in Slabtown,” says Dotson. “During the pandemic, we’d get these fun notes of like, ‘Hey, look what I made on my backyard grill!’ And it was a Pinocchio. I think that’s the ethos of this iteration.”

To bolster that artisan-forward vision, PAM will invite ShadowMachine animators to the museum to provide in-person, behind-the-scenes context on select weekends. PAM CUT is also offering a series of summer courses for youth spanning subjects from stop-motion to creature design that will incorporate exhibition visits into the curriculum. And del Toro himself, who will be honored at PAM CUT’s Cinema Unbound Awards June 22, will give a talk the next day to kick off a series with 35mm screenings of some of his films at the Whitsell Auditorium. 

“I feel like Portland is having a little bit of a moment,” says Dotson. It’s hard to disagree: Pinocchio just became the first feature-length Rose City production to take home Oscar gold; Ben Affleck and Matt Damon just brought us their Nike saga Air; and perennial PNW-lover Kelly Reichardt’s new film Showing Up is making a splash on the art house circuit. What’s more, del Toro is already in talks with Netflix and ShadowMachine to develop another stop-motion project in Portland.

Dotson hopes that Crafting Pinocchio helps harness all that momentum by reminding Portlanders of the city’s creative fertility. Stop-motion animation is, after all, baked into Stumptown’s artistic identity: it’s a world-class destination for the fussy, left-of-center art form, alongside London and Seoul. 

“I suppose the clichéd answer would be that all the rain makes people want to be indoors, but I think it’s more about the history. There’s such a rich tradition here,” says Gustafson, of the city where he can officially say he's made it big by playing with toys.