How Mackinnon & Saunders engineered Pinocchio's mechanical and 3D-printed puppet heads

befores & afters (Ian Failes, 2022-12-12) reports on how Mackinnon & Saunders built the mechanical and 3D-printed puppet heads for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, drawing on interviews with director of character fabrication Georgina Hayns and head puppet maker Richard Pickersgill. Most of the film's characters, including Geppetto, carry fully mechanical heads: a roughly three-inch head holds a gear system driving jaw movement, three hinged lower-lip paddles for consonant shapes, four independently articulated moustache paddles, an eyebrow paddle, and a ball-and-socket eye mechanism behind a separate blinking sheet, with miniature gears engineered in England by co-founder Peter Saunders and joints supplied as kit parts sized per character. Del Toro chose mechanical control for most characters specifically so an animator could act through the face directly rather than choose from "a box of replacements." Pinocchio's own head broke that pattern: because a mechanical wood-grain face read as rubber, the puppet instead wears a run of full-colour 3D-printed replacement masks over a resin core, with a wood-grain colour gradient -- lighter at the head, darker toward the extremities -- baked into the prints to answer the same translucency problem across the body's separately metal-printed armature. Folded into the Wiki's Mechanical puppet page as the diagram-level cam-and-linkage account that page's editorial notes had been missing.