For some godforsaken reason, pop culture is currently in the midst of a Pinocchio epidemic. Left and right, up and down, Pinocchio is everywhere. Disney dumped out their live-action remake of Pinocchio earlier this year, a drab, mostly beat-for-beat remake, apart from the addition of pop culture references and Disney+ advertising. Then, over from Russia, we have the infamous Pinocchio: A True Story, a very-fictional animated film starring Pauly Shore, which is almost certainly a front for a mafia money-laundering scheme. And, finally, in the world of gaming, we have Lies of P, a grim-and-gritty reimagining of Pinocchio as a magical steampunk Blade Runner, where Pinocchio himself resembles a cybernetically-enhanced Timothée Chalamet. It’s a little unfair to lump that last one in with the others, but regardless, Pinocchio has become an icon of unoriginality, a soulless husk puppeteered by corporate forces looking to make an easy profit off name-recognition. But just as it seemed that there was no integrity left, out has emerged Guillermo del Toro to grant the character life once again.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio has been in the works for more than 15 years. This movie has been shelved, scrapped, and condemned to development hell several times over, its mere existence being proof of del Toro’s commitment to the project. He’s stated in the past that “No artform has influenced [his] life and [his] work” more than the original Carlo Collodi novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, which becomes evident when taking a closer look at his works. Del Toro has an abundant passion for the abnormal, and apart from 2021’s Nightmare Alley, every project he’s ever worked on has grappled with monsters and misfits, and Pinocchio becomes a very interesting story when viewed under del Toro’s signature lens.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio opens with our narrator, the erudite Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor), introducing us to Geppetto (David Bradley), who is left a broken man after losing his grandson Carlo (Gregory Mann) to the horrors of The Great War. Stricken by grief and driven by mania, Geppetto obsessively attaches himself to his workbench, seeking to recreate the life that was stolen from him, to no avail. Geppetto’s failure attracts the pity of the mystical Wood Sprites (Tilda Swinton), who bestow immortal life to one of his wooden creations. Thus, Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) is born!
Immediately, del Toro’s vision of Pinocchio makes a grand departure from the Disney classic. The story is shrouded by death, capturing the overwhelming fear of mortality present during the reign of fascist Italy. Del Toro also draws several parallels between Pinocchio and Frankenstein, both in the gothic-European aesthetic, as well as the similarities between Pinocchio and The Monster. Pinocchio himself is markedly inhuman here: his appearance is crude, and unfinished. His movements are eerily contorted, unbound by the limits of human flesh and ligament. And of course, Pinocchio’s most inhuman trait of all: his endless optimism in the face of a world that only wants to use and abuse him.
That’s what the heart of Pinocchio is all about: the story of a boy who’s too pure for his own good being tempted by the corrupt world that surrounds him. The threat of Pinocchio’s corruption has never been as tangible as it is in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The story still follows the familiar beats of Pinocchio being recruited by greedy carnies and traveling to dangerous faraway lands, but the World War II backdrop heightens the stakes by giving those beats a real-world edge. But what makes the film special is that in spite of all of that, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio does not feel like a needlessly dark or “edgy” rendition of Disney’s childhood classic. In fact, tonally, the two films are just about identical. Del Toro’s version has every bit of the magic and whimsy of Disney’s, but he imbues the story with a level of humanity that makes for a welcome update to the source material.
Despite “Guillermo del Toro” being in the title for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, it feels important to acknowledge that he isn’t its sole creator. The movie could not exist without co-director Mark Gustafson and the several animation studios that collaborated to create it. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is by an incredible margin one of the most beautiful, technically impressive stop-motion movies ever created. The animation is remarkably fluid, the characters are deeply expressive, and the sets possess great depth, feeling real and lived in. It’s the type of film that shows how excellent stop-motion can be. At their best, stop-motion films reap all the benefits of the animated medium while maintaining the tactility of live-action. With stop-motion animation, half of the fun is realizing that every frame is a photograph of something that actually existed in the real world at some point, albeit digitally augmented. With that in mind, movies that push the medium to the level that Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio does truly are a marvelous feat of filmmaking.
Finally, the soundtrack by Alexandre Desplat is incredible. The songs aren’t quite as memorable as the Leigh Harline classics from Disney’s Pinocchio, but they’re still fantastic pieces of music. Geppetto and Pinocchio’s complementary ballads, “My Son” and “Ciao Papa” are the clear standout pieces from the soundtrack, but there’s also a song where Pinocchio tells Benito Mussolini to eat shit, so yeah. The competition for “best song” is pretty stiff in this one. Outside of the grand music numbers, Desplat’s score is contemplative and deeply moving when it wants to be, making Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio stand out as one of the best-scored films released this year.
Overall, it’s always exciting to see a visionary like Guillermo del Toro get to make their passion project. Del Toro’s admiration for Collodi’s original story emanates throughout every fiber of the film, while still maintaining a personality of its own, which is a breath of fresh air for the burgeoning Pinocchio mini genre. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is certainly worth checking out, especially for fans of animation, del Toro’s other works, or just quality movies in general.
RATING: 4.5/5
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio will be streaming on Netflix beginning December 9