Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio: A Review - A Wooden Puppet on a Wooden Cross
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SEE IT. A dark but timely and profound version of the old classic that features glorious stop-motion animation.
2022 is apparently the year of Pinocchio directed by Academy Award winners.
First this year was the live-action remake of the 1940 Disney animated classic Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring two-time Oscar winner Tom Hanks.
Zemeckis’ Pinocchio hit Disney + on September 8th and was promptly skewered by none other than little old me for being an absolute piece of shit. After watching this true cinematic abomination, I wrote, “when I wish upon a star, I wish that this horrendously heinous movie is the final nail in the coffin for Zemeckis and Hanks’ insipidly saccharine careers. A man can dream.”
Zemeckis’ career has been in a downward spiral ever since he fell in love with motion-capture technology on The Polar Express in 2004 and Pinocchio would seem to be his hitting the very bottom of the worst toilet in Hollywood.
Director Guillermo del Toro on the other hand, seems to be only growing into more of a singular artistic genius. Coming off his Best Picture and Best Director winning efforts on The Shape of Water (2017), he gifted us with last year’s under-appreciated gem Nightmare Alley.
Now del Toro is back with his own take on the Pinocchio story – now streaming on Netflix, and it’s a testament to his artistry, vision and originality, not to mention proof of his vast filmmaking superiority to Robert Zemeckis.
Del Toro’s Pinocchio, inspired by Gris Grimly’s illustrations in a 2002 version of the original Carlo Collodi novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a stop-motion animated musical film that is an existential dream/nightmare which wrestles with such unfathomable topics as mortality, humanity, fascism, war and love.
The movie certainly looks inviting to kids with its gloriously lush and detailed stop-motion animation, but its tone is undeniably dark. I watched with my 7-year-old son and he said afterward that it had “too many bombs and stuff for kids”.
That said, when he originally saw the preview for the movie, he said he didn’t want to watch it at all because it looked “terrible”, and he encouraged me to write a negative review of it without even seeing it. After a long and probably fruitless conversation about the ethics of professional film criticism, I convinced him to watch it with me and, despite some philosophically weighty subjects, he did really enjoy it, as did my wife and I.
It's not surprising that a story about the tumultuous but unbreakable love between a father and son would resonate with a father and son attached at the hip, but what made this Pinocchio even more poignant for us, and profound in general, was its focus on death and the fleeting and fragile nature of life, as we have been grappling with those perilous and ponderous topics in our home of late.
It's not surprising that del Toro would imbue his Pinocchio story with such profound existential depth, since his 2006 masterpiece, Pan’s Labyrinth, also dealt with a young child confronting the most onerous of topics, such as death and fascism.
Del Toro, ever the idiosyncratic artist, makes the wise decision in his Pinocchio to replace the Pleasure Island storyline from the original with a striking examination of militarism and fascism that is remarkably insightful in our hyper-militarized culture.
Instead of little boys eschewing discipline in pursuit of bodily pleasures, del Toro’s boys eschew bodily pleasure in favor of fascism and its discipline, militarism and pursuit of battlefield glory. This is a tale as old as time about how young men (and their parents) are blindfolded by a waving flag and surrender to a thoughtless conformity which results in their fighting wars for the rich against other poor people in far off lands.
Considering Hollywood is in reality the propaganda arm of the Pentagon and intelligence community – which has an iron grip on what movies and tv shows get made and which don’t, it’s shocking to see such a fearless anti-war message front and center in a mainstream movie.
In addition to the fascism storyline – which seems as relevant as ever as the drums of war against Russia are mindlessly and relentlessly beaten on a daily basis across American culture, del Toro adds some of his uniquely morbid flair to the festivities with a visit to the afterworld/underworld, which is both amusing, alarming and unnerving.
Besides those specific changes, del Toro also plays a little fast and loose with some other parts of the story, but despite this his Pinocchio still manages to ring spiritually true to the original.
Speaking of which, what makes del Toro’s Pinocchio so very interesting is that it features religion – Catholicism. Worship of Christ is seen in a few scenes, and the moral foundations of Catholicism are present thematically throughout the film.
In our supposedly secular age where moralistic therapeutic deism and identity politics pass for religion, traditional religion is usually used in entertainment only to convey the inherent evil of its adherents, but del Toro masterfully weaves the magic and mystery of Christ into his tale, thus giving his film a profundity and depth unimaginable in something like Zemeckis’ version, which was a virtue-signaling affair dedicated to the shallow, putrid waters of political correctness.
The voice cast in del Toro’s Pinocchio, which consists of Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, David Bradley as Geppetto, Tilda Swinton as the Wood Sprite, Ron Perleman as Podesta and Cate Blanchett as Spazzatura the monkey, are all fantastic.
And yes, there are songs in the film, but thankfully the music never overwhelms the movie and the songs are actually quite good.
The best thing about the film though, besides del Toro’s visionary script, is the stop-motion animation. Stop-motion, for those unfamiliar, is the type of animation used on movies like Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, or on those great old Rankin/Bass productions of Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and A Year Without a Santa Claus which run every year around Christmas on tv. It is a painstaking art form but it creates a unique visual experience by making the setting and characters three dimensional.
I’ve always loved stop-motion animation, and del Toro’s distinctive vision, which is on display in all his films, and the artistry of the animators, makes for a truly captivating cinematic experience.
I highly recommend Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for cinephiles and normal folks alike. The film is as compelling a version of this story as has ever been produced.
I think kids (and adults for that matter) mature enough to handle dipping their toes into the cold, deep waters of existentialism, and who are able to consider the fragility of life without melting down into despair, ought to watch del Toro’s Pinocchio as it’s as profound as any movie made in the last three years.
©2022