Stacchi now returns with The Monkey King, a 3D animated adventure inspired by the Ming Dynasty epic, Journey to the West. 'I've always gone back and forth, and I think there's a lot of people in animation - especially feature animation - who do that while they try to get their next film going.' 'My whole career has really been about directing something and then storyboarding on someone else's project and then directing again,' he says.
In the interim, Stacchi kept busy working as a storyboard artist on projects such as 2019's Missing Link and Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film this year. 'After The Boxtrolls, I developed a few other projects that didn't end up going anywhere, so I went off and did other things.' 'It wasn't for a lack of trying,' the director says with a laugh. According to Stacchi, the nine-year gap between The Boxtrolls and his new film, Netflix's The Monkey King, wasn't intentional. Yet, it would be nearly a decade before he released a follow-up. In 2015, Anthony Stacchi earned his first Oscar nomination when The Boxtrolls, a splendid stop-motion animated comedy from Laika, was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film.
