Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
Guillermo del Toro pours his wounded heart and “half [my] fucking career” into Pinocchio, a distinctly different but concurrently more authentic adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s classic tale about a little puppet made of pine. Spending no less than 15 years trying to get his version made del Toro found that, like his arborous archetype, he needed some help along the way. Grabbing Fantastic Mr Fox animation director Mark Gustafson by one hand and Over The Garden Wall screenwriter Patrick McHale by the other, three good boys skip merrily down the road of their pooled creative brilliance, hindered only slightly by the strings that bind them to their streaming service puppetmaster.
In a little Italian village on a hill lives woodcarver Geppetto and his beloved son, Carlo. Apple of his eye and obedient to a T, Carlo would be considered by the leader of the time (Mussolini) an ideal candidate for a youth camp. It’s the 1930s and despite the reminder of war (from the aircraft that populate the skies above their home), Geppetto and Carlo couldn’t be happier with their comfortable existence and popularity with their neighbours. One night, however, a bomber that just so happens to discard its cargo above the village on the return home takes the life of Geppetto’s only child, leaving behind a perfect pinecone he’d found that morning.
Struck by grief and anger, Geppetto spends the next chunk of his life unable to move on and (in a plot point the Disney film omits) turns to alcohol to soothe his pain. Ostracised by the rest of the village and having lost all joy in wood carving (or anything), he plants the pinecone next to Carlo’s grave and does very little but sit beneath it, drunk and depressed for the entirety of the tree’s life. One night, when a lyrical cricket happens upon the tree and sets up his new home office inside its trunk, Geppetto just so happens to have had enough and chops the tree down. Dragging a sizable log back to his house, he carves the first piece he’s made since tragedy befell him; a little wooden puppet in the form of a boy.
Stumbling up his own stairs and vowing to “finish you in the morning”, Geppetto passes out and misses what happens next. Where Christ failed to answer his former disciple’s pained cries for help all these years, a Wood Sprite finally answers. Floating in and breathing magical life into Pinocchio, she charges the cricket inhabiting his trunk with guiding his vessel towards the right path. The rest, as they say, is history.
Since I had the pleasure of not seeing the most recent Disney live action reboot, I went into this with only vague memories of the 1940 version. One of Disney’s most critically lauded films, del Toro has a deep affection for this Pinocchio; it’s a film that he associates with his mother as the two watched it in his childhood and were forever bonded by the experience. But it also planted within him seeds of frustration with the obedience demanded of Pinocchio in order to attain ‘real boy’ status and the warped picture of the world presented to him.
“Pinocchio saw the world as I did; daunting, full of lies and fraught with danger,” says del Toro, “so I’d been wanting to make a movie about disobedience as a virtue.”
The 11-year-old budding director attempted this with a Super 8 mm camera and clay animation, but failed; perhaps, what it really takes to tap into childhood fears and misunderstanding, is an adult perspective. Thanks to years of development hell and trouble finding funding for a dark, stop-motion animated version of a story that’s been done to death, del Toro got a lot of time to reflect.
“The point of being over 40 is to fulfil the desires you’ve been harbouring since you were 7,” - Guillermo del Toro, all grown up.
It’s for this reason that Pinocchio so marvellously intertwines its director’s political and religious observations (gained through age and experience) with his signature blend of dark fantasy.
Echoing the anti-fascist sentiments of previous highlights of del Toro’s filmography, Pinocchio manages to season a classical children’s story with more adult themes of life under a dictatorship and the hypocritical nature of Christianity (sticking points from del Toro’s own childhood as someone with Spanish parents who lived under Francoist rule and ran a strict Catholic household after settling in Mexico.) When the village discovers that Pinocchio returns from beyond every time he ‘dies’ (established by a darkly comedic scene involving a truck and a wooden boy who does not understand the rules of foot traffic), apt comparisons to the Messiah arise, along with possible wartime applications for an immortal child.
What Pinocchio does beautifully is illustrate life’s more confusing facets from the perspective of an innocent ‘other’. Pinocchio does not understand why the village folk embrace a wooden statue of Christ but reject a little wooden boy as demonic. He takes everyone at face value because the only rule he’s sure of is that a tree branch sprouts from the centre of his face when he lies. When encountering new items, Pinocchio exclaims “I love it…what is it?”, leading with optimism and forming opinions later. Upon meeting Death in the underworld and learning that he can never die, he rejoices; “that’s good, isn’t it?” he asks before learning the implications of outliving everyone he loves and existing purely to console a grieving man who yearns for his ‘real’ son. It’s complicated stuff but it’s not all doom and gloom; Pinocchio is also an example of how extrinsic factors contribute to the overall feel of the story.
Worthy of particular praise are the central voice performances of Gregory Mann as Pinocchio and David Bradley as Geppetto. Mann brings an infectious, endearing quality to his jaunty counterpart both in voicework and singing. David Bradley (an unlikely choice on paper) delivers a nuanced, relatable Geppetto that simply isn’t there in the Disney original; his is a heartbroken, imperfect and reluctant father figure whose softening to Pinocchio’s quirks can be heard in the subtlety of his tonal changes as the film goes on. Ewan McGregor spiritedly narrates the story and guides his wooden ward as Sebastian J. Cricket, writer and raconteur who can only do his best. Tilda Swinton channels Spirited Away’s polar opposite magical sisters as both the Wood Sprite and Death, whose differing views on sticking to rules of nature are apparent in their timbres.
While Alexandre Desplat’s score and soundtrack are unlikely to surpass the iconicism of the original, there’s something more meaningful to this collection and their relevance to the film’s messages. “Ciao Papa” is the hero track of the film and one that del Toro himself contributed to; serving as a sombre goodbye after Pinocchio decides to prove himself more than just a burden to Geppetto, the song packs an emotional punch. Desplat also manages to use music to convey interesting character traits; Gregory Mann intentionally emphasises the wrong syllables in many of his songs because Pinocchio is oblivious to rules and conventions, and the resulting sound is uniquely childlike.
This Pinocchio is also visually spectacular in its catering to del Toro’s dark, fantastical aesthetic through partnership with the Jim Henson company. Inspired by the 2002 Gris Grimly illustrated version of Collodi’s tale, small-scale models were constructed and many (many) puppets and figures were used throughout the stop-motion shoot. One shot took 2 months to film; thankfully, cinematographer Frank Passingham’s CV includes Chicken Run, Kubo and the Two Strings and Coraline. Good things take time and in the end, it’s well worth the wait.
Speaking to the audience at the British Film Festival in October, del Toro revealed that the opening night of his Pinocchio was of particular significance (and partial sorrow) as, not one day earlier, his beloved mother passed away. Dedicating the film to his parents (now both gone), it’s clear that this is one of del Toro’s most personal endeavours; how lucky that we should be invited to share in it.
That this film only got a small cinema release prior to its Netflix debut on December 9th is something of a travesty; if you have any time at all over the next week to see it in the environment it deserves (Pinocchio is currently playing here and here), please make the trip.
