Guillermo del Toro on the set of Pinocchio
Image: Jason Schmidt/Netflix
The Best Animated Feature Oscar, the first statue handed out at the 95th Academy Awards on March 12, went to Pinocchio. The film, directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, was shot mostly at the Northwest Portland offices of LA-based ShadowMachine, the stop-motion animation studio behind Robot Chicken, BoJack Horseman, and the doll sequence in Booksmart.
In the decades since McMinnville-born Will Vinton won an Oscar for Best Animated Short film for 1974’s nine-minute Closed Mondays, Portland has become a hub of stop-motion animation.
It’s a rare win in the category for an animated film that isn’t connected to Disney or Pixar (which was acquired by Disney in 2006). Films made by animation studio Laika (which started out as Will Vinton Studios) have been nominated for the Best Animated Feature Academy Award—for Missing Link, Kubo and the Two Strings, The Boxtrolls, ParaNorman, and Coraline—but never won.
Del Toro thanked, among others, his late parents and the “love of [his] life,” wife Kim Morgan, a former film critic for the Oregonian and Willamette Week.
The second award of the night, for Best Supporting Actor, also had an Oregon connection. Winning for his role of multiple versions of Waymond Wang in Everything Everywhere All at Once, Ke Huy Quan thanked his “Goonies brother for life Jeff Cohen,” who played Chunk in the Astoria-set classic Goonies. Quan played the gadget-laden young inventor Data in the 1985 film, but later ceased acting due to a lack of opportunity, working instead on the other side of the camera as a stunt coordinator and assistant director. Cohen, now an entertainment lawyer, helped secure Quan the role in Everything Everywhere All at Once.
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