Guillermo Del Toro

Guillermo del Toro has recently received some of the best reviews of his career for his stop-motion animated version of Pinocchio, co-directed with Mark Gustafson. As expected, del Toro has pumped all the eerie, macabre creepiness of the source material back into the story after the Disney adaptations removed those elements. Instead of shying away from the darkness, del Toro embraces it. After the bitter disappointment of Disney’s bland live-action remake of their own animated Pinocchio, del Toro’s version has arrived as a breath of fresh air.

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Throughout his entire career, del Toro has been telling stories that expose the humanity of monsters. Pinocchio’s titular puppet who wants to be a real boy has joined a rogues’ gallery of sympathetic monsters that includes Blade, Hellboy, and the “Amphibian Man” from The Shape of Water.

George Miller

The high-octane vehicular carnage of the Mad Max films earned George Miller a much-deserved reputation as one of the world’s greatest action directors. His next franchise, created in the interim between the underwhelming conclusion of the original Mad Max trilogy and the unbridled glory of the action-packed reboot Fury Road, couldn’t have been a more drastic change of pace. Miller followed up his post-apocalyptic carsploitation spaghetti westerns with a cartoon musical about dancing penguins.

With its heartwarming tale of soulmates and self-discovery, Happy Feet earned the inaugural BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film and also became the fourth non-Disney or Pixar movie to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

Steven Spielberg

Arguably the most famous filmmaker on the planet, Steven Spielberg is the master of cinematic escapism who pioneered the modern blockbuster. With timeless hits like Jaws, E.T., and the Indiana Jones series, Spielberg has become the most commercially successful director of all time by a wide margin. After using groundbreaking CG techniques to bring the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park to life, Spielberg tackled a fully computer-animated feature to bring Hergé’s iconic Tintin comics to the screen.

With a combination of motion-capture performances and traditional computer animation, Spielberg deftly recaptured the escapist magic of Raiders of the Lost Ark to send Tintin and Captain Haddock on a globetrotting adventure in search of fortune and glory.

Tim Burton

Since his heyday in the ‘80s and ‘90s, Tim Burton has been a fan-favorite filmmaker renowned for his weird sensibility, often putting a bizarre twist on mundane subjects like suburban life and, in Netflix’s new Wednesday series, boarding school education. Burton made audiences care about a man with scissors for fingers, told the life story of Ed Wood in the style of a black-and-white Ed Wood B-movie, and upended the Adam West tradition to make Batman a badass. As a primarily visual director, Burton’s uniquely gothic cinematic style was perfect for the realm of animation.

Over a decade after producing The Nightmare Before Christmas for director Henry Selick, Burton sat in the director’s chair for a stop-motion animated dark fantasy musical of his own. Corpse Bride is the quintessential Burton movie, with pitch-black humor, inventive visuals, bittersweet feels, and a whimsical take on sinister themes.

Wes Anderson

After live-action dramedies like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums had made him one of the most celebrated filmmakers in Hollywood, Wes Anderson tried his hand at stop-motion animation with an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. This resulted in one of Anderson’s finest films; a breezy, lighthearted crime caper that’s fun for the whole family. A few years later, Anderson returned to the medium with Isle of Dogs, an original story set in a bleak dystopian near-future.

After making the leap over to animation, Anderson brought the medium’s creative control back into his live-action efforts. There’s a noticeable difference between Anderson’s live-action filmmaking before and after Fantastic Mr. Fox. In films like The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch, Anderson used in-camera editing and meticulous blocking to direct his actors like stop-motion figurines.

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