Something that only just clicked with me when watching Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is that I have never seen a bad stop-motion animated film. Not one. Don’t worry, I’m not about to say that Pinocchio is bad, it’s just a startling fact that I can’t believe I’ve never noticed. At their best, some stop-motion films are some of my favourites of all time and even some of the weaker Laika and Aardman films are still pretty damn fun. It’s a medium that lives and dies on creativity, so it’s often a good thing that the people making stop-motion films clearly love the art form.
Pinocchio has been Guillermo del Toro’s passion project for some time and despite it being stuck in development hell for over a decade, it’s obvious that working on critically-acclaimed films such as The Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth has reinvigorated del Toro’s drive to make his own definitive version of the Pinocchio story. Remember that there was also another Pinocchio movie last year, a remake of the 1940 Disney adaptation starring Tom Hanks that was universally panned, so Guillermo del Toro’s version has to stand out in a movie market saturated by remakes of classic films and stories that audiences are beginning to tire of.
Guillermo del Toro’s version of Pinocchio is a wildly different adaptation than the Disney classic. Perhaps the most immediate difference is the narrative style being adopted, as this retelling of the fairytale eschews much of the traditional fairytale elements in the setting in favour of the cold hard reality of fascist Italy. Happy times.
This was something that really interested me when news trickled out about this film last year, as I spent two years at History A-Level looking at the rise of fascist Italy and how Mussolini came to power, and the idea of a fantastical story being fitted to a historical period like this is a really engaging one. Del Toro manages to weave a really exciting and involving story out of this setting, making his version of Pinocchio a real delight to watch.
Pinocchio doesn’t need to relay to the viewers tons of information about fascist Italy for them to understand the story though. Fascist Italy isn’t merely a backdrop here, but likewise it’s not the be all and end all. In the first half-hour, Del Toro mainly uses it as a mood-setter. The first act of the film is fairly bleak, as Gepetto is shown to be a devoted Christian and a father grieving the loss of his son, who was in their local church when it was targeted during an air raid in World War I. The Pinocchio doll is the product of his mourning, lending the film a strong emotional core that really grounds the story even when we go on the wacky escapades later on. Speaking of which, this is also a musical – there sure is a lot going on in Del Toro’s Pinocchio.
Even the stop-motion animation follows this more humanistic retelling of the story. It’s predictably lush as most stop-motion is, but the highly cartoonish style of the Disney staple (something replicated and imitated in many other properties including Shrek) is overhauled in favour of some phenomenal modelwork with its human characters, and a simple but effective primitive design for the central Pinocchio doll. He’s made solely from pinewood, isn’t painted and is barely varnished, but it’s still stunningly crafted, and I especially love the visual way that the film presents Pinocchio lying. Obviously we know the gimmick in which Pinocchio’s nose extends, but Del Toro’s adaptation shows this nose growing like a tree, with branches and leaves sprouting out of all angles. It’s freakish but also strangely beautiful.
Despite the historically-grounded setting and an overall bleaker tone, Del Toro’s Pinocchio still reveals itself to be full of magic and splendour.
I keep alluding to this adaptation being drastically different, which is perhaps a bit misleading. This still follows many of the same plot beats as other adaptations, especially the Disney classic. He runs away from Gepetto, gets swallowed up by a whale, yada yada yada. However, the choices that Del Toro makes deviate from the original source material are inspired.
Easily the most distressing sequence in the 1940 Disney film is Pleasure Island, where lots of innocent little boys are turned into donkeys and shipped off to be slaves in salt mines. This plot strand isn’t found here (which is for the best, I’m not having more nightmares), but instead of being threatened with being a donkey slave, Pinocchio is instead conscripted into the Italian Army serving Benito Mussolini. I don’t know, personally I’d probably take that over being turned into a donkey.
This subplot engaged me in the setting more, and I became more fascinated as to why Del Toro chose to set the film here. After some research and a dive into the behind-the-scenes featurettes on the Blu-Ray, I found the actual answer really intriguing – Del Toro wanted the character of Pinocchio to be more autonomous and free-thinking, as opposed to older adaptations which very much placed him as a meek and naïve child in need of being saved.
This isn’t to say that this Pinocchio isn’t all or at least some of these things, because he is. He walks straight into obvious traps, for instance being the main headline in a puppet show run by a shady crook, and has the extreme lack of self-awareness needed to sing an anti-Mussolini song right in front of il Duce himself. However, Del Toro is keen to show that Pinocchio learns from these encounters, and as a result the third act is really cathartic to watch, showing Pinocchio and Geppetto escape from the belly of a whale in another beautifully-animated sequence.
This complaint may seem really petty, but if I had to criticise one thing about Pinocchio as a character, it’s actually the voice. Gregory Mann isn’t bad as a voice actor, and I get what they were going for giving Pinocchio a very plucky and exuberant personality, but sometimes the outgoing innocent Britishness of his voice can become a little grating. It never gets too annoying, but there are times where I did ponder if Mussolini had a point when he had Pinocchio executed.
On the whole, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is one of those films that’s almost boringly fantastic. You know going on that Del Toro has a tremendous passion for the story, you know going in that the stop-motion animation will be so good it leaps off the screen, and you know that there will be interesting subversions of the story that will lend this adaptation its own unique charm. Despite the historically-grounded setting and an overall bleaker tone, this version of Pinocchio still reveals itself to be full of magic and splendour.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio is out now on Criterion Collection
Also streaming on NETFLIX
