Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: The Virtue of Disobedience

This is not Disney’s version of the story, following closer to some aspects of the original 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, but in reality, this is truly Del Toro’s reimagining of the tale.  The new stop-motion animated film uses an aesthetic modeled after Gris Grimly’s character illustrations from a 2002 edition of the original novel.  The movie began development as early as 2008 and was scheduled for 2013 or 2014 release, but at some point, it went into development hell until 2017 when new work on the project picked up.

The storyline for Pinocchio is pretty basic.  A man, Geppetto (David Bradley) who lost his young son carves a puppet resembling a boy out or pine wood and wishes it were real.  A Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) grants the wish, and the newly alive Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) gets into all sorts of trouble as he tries to navigate the human world and learn what it really means to have lived and loved.  He is guided by Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor), a talking cricket who acts as his conscience. Del Toro took the basic plot and added some darker themes making the characters more complex and interesting.  He begins the story before Geppetto loses his son, Carlo, so we can feel the true depths of his grief.  Pinocchio is not as well behaved as Carlo but is constantly compared to him.  He is exuberant, rowdy and disobedient, but still a good boy at heart.  The setting for the story is also changed to 1930s fascist Italy, with many plot points revolving around the Podesta (Ron Perlman), the towns fascist leader and Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) a circus ringmaster who wants to rise back up to fame and glory by using Pinocchio.

The production value on the film is very high with the look and feel being very stylized.  I am a fan of Gris Grimly’s work but would have never thought it could work for a stop-motion family friendly animation film, as his drawings borderline on the macabre and horrific. The movie’s run time is a bit long for a family film at just over two hours and I will say, it took me a bit of time to connect with the characters.  Geppetto was a bit too gruff with Pinocchio at first and Pinocchio a bit too disobedient, but once the movie really gets going you do finally connect, causing some very emotional scenes primarily at the end.  The voice cast is spectacular with some of my favorite actors, Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, Ron Perlman and Cate Blanchett to just name a few.  Their performances evoke the proper emotional responses throughout the movie.  Although Del Toro does say this is a family friendly movie, I am not sure how much younger children will enjoy it.  The artistic style is gorgeous, but a bit darker and scarier which matches the plotline, and the humor is more subtle. I am sure it will be fine for some children, but parents should possibly watch a bit of it first and then decide how their specific children will react.