Photo courtesy of imdb.com
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” released in 2022, is another telling of Pinocchio’s classic story based on the book written by Carlo Collodi. However, this film gives us a much darker version of the story over what most of the modernized tellings give us.
In Guillermo del Toro’s version, which is a PG-rated film for kids, he explores more complicated themes such as depression through the loss of a family member as well as the impact of fascism in Europe during the interwar period — between the two world wars.
Within the first few minutes of the film we see Geppetto, voiced by David Bradley, lose his son due to their church getting bombed, and we follow him as he turns to alcohol and seclusion to bury his emotions. As much as this film is about Pinocchio and his story, it’s also about Geppetto and his experience with grieving and finding a way to move on from the absolutely horrible thing that happened to him.
We are given a mix of fun and exciting characters, as well as dark and, honestly, just plain evil characters. Ewan McGregor voices Sebastian, who acts as the film’s narrator as well as Pinocchio’s little cricket friend and mentor. Pinocchio himself, as well as Carlo, Geppetto’s son, is voiced by Gregory Mann. The two villains are Podesta, a nazi, voiced by Ron Perlman and Volpe, a crazy carnival guy, voiced by Christoph Waltz. All of the performances are superb, with the interesting characters leaving you wanting more, and the evil characters making you feel truly bad about them.
This film is animated using stop-motion animation, and it is truly beautiful. Stop-motion is a form of animation that uses physical models that one moves very slightly, and then takes a photo of it, and then strings a series of photos together to give the illusion of movement. Examples of stop-motion include: “The Nightmare Before Christmas” in 1993, “Coraline” in 2009, and “Mad God” in 2021. Generally films made using stop-motion animation have a look that gives it away. In “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” the animation is so well done that I didn’t even realize it was stop-motion at first. It honestly looked as if it was all CGI, and personally I think that’s a testament to how well the animators did on this film.
In the opening scene we see Geppetto standing over a tree on the top of a hill. Surrounding this hill are dark, gloomy mountains, and it’s lightly snowing out. The narrator, Sebastian, accompanies this scene with his starting line: “By the time Master Geppetto made Pinocchio, he had already lost a son.” As the camera comes in closer we can see Geppetto is cleaning off his son’s grave, his face somber mostly covered in shadow. This scene does a great job of setting up the tone of the film. Throughout the film, Pinocchio is a joyous being who is thrusted into a non joyous world, just trying to survive.
I really don’t want to give away too much of this film as I believe that it’s a must watch for everyone. Easily I’d rate “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” with a 5/5 Ninja Turtles. As mentioned before, this film gives us complicated themes to explore yet does it in a way that I think most people will be able to understand, including children. The film looks stunning, providing fun and dark set pieces, as well as intertwining some meaningful magic sequences throughout. If you haven’t already, go ahead and boot up Netflix and give this film a watch. It’s new and unique despite it being a story that gets told time and time again.
