Guillermo del Toro’s new stop-motion animation film is the second Pinocchio movie to release this year, after Robert Zemeckis’ live-action remake starring Tom Hanks, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. But I’m not complaining. Because of about 60 versions of Pinocchio that exist on film, del Toro’s reimagining of the children’s classic is arguably the most original and unafraid.
Del Toro retains the barebones structure—a wooden boy created by a grieving disgruntled father, a talking cricket, the blue fairy, and their misadventures, each a lesson in love, acceptance, loss, and growing up. But the beauty of del Toro's films lies in how he makes the political personal and in his unwavering love for the outcast.
So the maverick director sets the story—originally written by Carlo Collodi and published in 1883 as The Adventures of Pinocchio—in the Italy of the 1930s blinded by Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule. He uses the garb of a popular children’s tale to pointedly critique the adult world and its many horrors—war, greed, grief, obsession with obedience, and the inability to see the obvious.
Del Toro has co-written the film with Patrick McHale and co-directed it with Mark Gustafson. Together, the triad spins a story as fantastical and scary as Frankenstein. For Pinocchio too is a gross misfire of his creator’s genius, who willed him into existence out of frenzied frustration. Much like Frankenstein’s monster, Pinocchio is also left out in the world to his own devices with as little instruction. Moreover, he is just as ugly and abominable, a thing to be feared, not loved, when all he longs for is just that.
The film’s voice cast brings to life with great brilliance del Toro’s anger with adults bossing children around pretending they know what they are doing. David Bradley (Argus Filch from the Harry Potter films) plays Gepetto, the skilled carpenter unable to move over his young son’s death. Gregory Mann is exuberant as the lively, inquisitive, and restless wooden boy eager to please his father and find his place in the world, which to him, is no less than a wonderland. Christoph Waltz is the scheming circus ringmaster Count Volpe, desperate to use this miracle of a wooden puppet to restore his traveling troupe’s lost glory. Finally, there’s Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J Cricket, the talking orthopteran insect, who lives inside the pine bark from which Pinocchio is carved out and serves as the story’s narrator.
But it is the film’s stop-motion animation that gives it its distinctive roughness and macabre quality and lends itself seamlessly to del Toro’s singular aesthetic and uncompromising vision. It’s so rich, textured, and extraordinary that you can almost touch Pinocchio’s woodenness, Gepetto’s thick beard, and the cricket’s slimy skin. It makes for such an immersive experience that you forget there’s a screen between you and the fantastical, supernatural world of del Toro’s making.
His Pinocchio reminded me of Jordan Peele’s Nope, a sensory, allegorical phenomenon of a film which released earlier this year. It too was a stinging commentary on our obsession with spectacle and our ineptness at dealing with it. When Gepetto first sees the wooden puppet that he made in the likeness of his dead son, walking and talking like a real boy, he squirms in disbelief. “What is this? What kind of sorcery?” he shouts. When Pinocchio makes his first public appearance at the local church, people scream in horror. “It’s a demon,” one man shouts. Another woman exclaims, “Witchcraft!” Afraid and enamored all at once, the local Podesta wants to make a child soldier out of him; the circus ringmaster, a spectacle. Meanwhile, all Gepetto wants is for him to go to school and not pester him with difficult existential questions.
In his drunken agony, the aging carpenter fashions Pinocchio as a coarse, wretched puppet, his ugliest creation yet with one ear, nails protruding unevenly from his back, one stray branch sticking out of his head, a hole in his chest where his heart should have been, and an overlong, pointed nose like that of a snowman that grows each time he lies. What, then, to make of him? You need to watch the film to decide.
