Little wooden head
There are those filmmakers whose artistic focus is so much on the creation of deeply over-designed worlds and heightened visual style, and so little on anything resembling tight storytelling and naturalistic emotions (I am, to be clear, not saying that this is a bad thing), that learning they are about to make their very first animated feature pretty much exclusively leads to thr response, "oh, well of course you are, I'm actually surprised it took this long". One of these filmmakers is Guillermo del Toro, and that very first animated feature he's just completed (a real lovely stop-motion puppet animation job) has been released under the terrifically blunt title Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio. Which, to be fair to the director, is probably a possessive that has been strapped onto the film solely because it is the second adaptation of Carlo Collodi's 1883 children's novel to have come out in 2022, following Disney's Pinocchio remake starring Tom Hanks and one of the most profoundly unpleasant CGI lead characters ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. It's terribly sad for GDT's Pinocchio that this means it comes pre-packaged with a certain muted but unmistakable stink of having coming in second place, because this is very obviously the better of the two 2022 Pinocchios. I mean, it had to be. The thought of one calendar year producing two different versions of the same story which were both so terrible that the Disney neo-Pinocchio actually managed to be the better of them is almost impossible to contemplate; it would mean not merely that the End Times are looming, but that we are in fact some ways into them already.
So yes, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is clearly the year's best Pinocchio, a low bar; it is moreover one of the year's best films generally, which is at least a higher bar. It's also, in my eyes, del Toro's best film since Pan's Labyrinth really made him altogether respectable back in 2006, which you may or may not consider a high bar, but I'm pretty much entirely comfortable with staking that claim. And to be clear before we get much farther "del Toro's film", whether it's his best or his worst or whatever, is skipping ahead of ourselves. It was in fact co-directed by Mark Gustafson, a stop-motion animator from way back: he got his start at Will Vinton Productions in the 1980s, and has animated, directed, and written several projects since then, though So Whose Pinocchio Is It, Anyway? is his first feature. Indeed, while this was del Toro's baby all along, when the project was first announced back in 2008, he was only onboard as writer and producer, and Gustafson has been attached as a director longer than the man whose name is above the title. I say this not out of a desire to shit all over del Toro's contributions to what has unquestionably been a passion project, and a very long-gestating one at that (at the very least, he earns that possessive title more than Tim Burton did for The Nightmare Before Christmas), but because the Vinton connection makes a lot about Anyway, It's Not Disney's Pinocchio click very firmly into place - particularly the fact that it was co-directed by a man whose professional debut was as an animator on the legendarily dark and upsetting 1985 piece of childhood nightmare fuel The Adventures of Mark Twain.
This means two things. First, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is pretty much unabashedly a horror movie version of Collodi's story: a playful, silly, dollhouse-snug child-friendly horror movie, but a horror movie nevertheless. And this makes it, in a sense, one of the truest adaptations of the novel I have ever seen, because the novel is a real fucked up piece of work, certainly more fucked up than any film version I am personally familiar with (and there are a ton of films based on Pinocchio, so please don't take my personal experience as definitive). And this is true even though the script by del Toro & Patrick McHale, working from a story treatment by del Toro & Matthew Robbins, veers pretty far afield from the letter of the narrative. This Pinocchio is set in the 1930s, and situates itself in a country and in individual lives that are still recovering from the carnage of the First World War; it is furthermore a satire on Fascism that presents the first telling of the story I am aware of whose avowed theme is that it's good when Pinocchio (Gregory Mann, appropriately irritating in his breathless line deliveries) breaks the rules and refuses to obey authority figures simply because they're authority figures, and that anybody who thinks that "be obedient and you'll become a Real Boy" is a good deal is somebody who will also probably jump at the chance to sell out their neighbors. Translating 19th Century European children's fantasies into anti-Fascist parables is of course not new territory for del Toro - 2006's Pan's Labyrinth, still surely his signature movie, is pretty much exactly "anti-Franco Alice in Wonderland" - but if I am being honest, I don't entirely think this plays; it's clever moreso than actually smart, and it's kind of vague, treating Mussolini (who appears in the stop-motion flesh) as a somewhat generic "big meanie". I do not know if my feelings about the satire would improve if the main anti-Mussolini gesture was not a musical number built largely around the idea "don't you think that Mussolini poops his pants? Well, I think he poops his pants", or if that gesture is in fact the closest the satire comes to working, but it's definitely a big ol' choice that's being made.
So I hardly touched on the horror element, but let me get to the other thing that Gustafson's presence seems to particularly bring to the table, which is the craftedness of the stop motion puppets. I don't just mean that they are fussy and tangible physical, the way that we see in the beloved work of the boutique stop motion studio Laika. The work that company produces is very intentionally looking to be as smooth and slick and polished as they can manage. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is more "rough" than that, "crude" even, though you'll not the scare quotes I'm using the hedge my bets. What this mostly looks like is that some incredibly delicate handmade wood carvings made in some wonderful pocket of the German or Italian Alps in the 19th Century have come to life, all full of the elaborate and minutely-detailed curlicues of facial wrinkles, hair, beards, clothing, and shiny, lifelike glass eyes. Which is, one must admit, a pretty outstanding aesthetic to bring to bear on an adaptation of Pinocchio. It's that certain whittled quality that recalls the best of Will Vinton Productions, certainly including The Adventures of Mark Twain, where the focus is never, ever on realistic movement, but almost proudly on the stiffness and lack of articulation in the puppets. Geppetto's (David Bradley) wonderful, wonderful beard is an exceptionally clear example of this, a mess of finely shaded curls that seem to be resolutely immobile as he moves around. Ironically, or perhaps not, the character this applies to the least is Pinocchio himself, who feels more translucent and pliable than the other characters, more spidery and fluid, a plastic toy in a world of handsome wooden figurines, and thus the breath of life and modernity that pushes the world around him out of its hostile conservatism.
This all goes hand-in-hand with those horrific elements; the whole thing has a kind of odd air of movement being "wrong" for these figures; Pinocchio skittering around manically not the least of it, but there's after all a kind of unmistakable creepiness to the things made for children in the 19th Century, and this film gets right at the heart of that handsomely off-putting vibe. Not just when it's transposing the book's most creepy elements, like its pallbearing rabbits, into creepy puppets. This film's version of the Blue Fairy is a strange, angular Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton), whose mouth never moves when she speaks, creating a ghostly aura around a ghostly figure, and its manticore-like embodiment of Death (also Tilda Swinton) is basically an amped-up version of the Sprite. Even the Cricket (Ewan McGregor, whose voice is absolutely perfect for the stately, pompous, and welcoming attitude that the Cricket has in this script) has a kind of subtly revolting and disturbing look to it, one masked the broad, simple comedy required of it this time around, but still present. It's all a bit spooky and funereal in the exact way that Pinocchio ought to be and practically never is.
The real del Toro-esque part of all this is that all of the ethereal weirdness and horrific vibe is inseparable from the film's big, sloppy heart and heavily underscored emotions. This is easily the most emotionally rich of del Toro's English-language films, which isn't a terribly high standard to meet, but it's still nice to report that he got there. Right from the long prologue that dwells and dwells on Geppetto's loss of his beloved son to the random vicissitudes of war, this Pinocchio is just drunk on its own earnestness about what the parent-child relationship means, as something warm and comforting, but also as something narcissistic and selfish, in the form of a parent who just wants a small being to have as their devoted subject (it is quite explicit in linking Mussolini's national authoritarianism to the petty control of fathers over households). It is so full of love: for the character of Pinocchio and the Collodi story; for the art of puppet-making and woodcarving as depicted in the story; for the art of puppet-making as embodied in the very puppet-forward stop-motion animation we see before us. It's fussy while also feeling like things are getting messy and out of control at every turn. More than anything, it feels like ghost children playing with their toys, and not the first time I've gotten that exact feeling from a del Toro picture; but that feeling was never more right than here. It's a lovely, garish, special movie, and without question my favorite Pinocchio, out of my incomplete sampling, since Disney's original 1940 masterpiece.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
So yes, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is clearly the year's best Pinocchio, a low bar; it is moreover one of the year's best films generally, which is at least a higher bar. It's also, in my eyes, del Toro's best film since Pan's Labyrinth really made him altogether respectable back in 2006, which you may or may not consider a high bar, but I'm pretty much entirely comfortable with staking that claim. And to be clear before we get much farther "del Toro's film", whether it's his best or his worst or whatever, is skipping ahead of ourselves. It was in fact co-directed by Mark Gustafson, a stop-motion animator from way back: he got his start at Will Vinton Productions in the 1980s, and has animated, directed, and written several projects since then, though So Whose Pinocchio Is It, Anyway? is his first feature. Indeed, while this was del Toro's baby all along, when the project was first announced back in 2008, he was only onboard as writer and producer, and Gustafson has been attached as a director longer than the man whose name is above the title. I say this not out of a desire to shit all over del Toro's contributions to what has unquestionably been a passion project, and a very long-gestating one at that (at the very least, he earns that possessive title more than Tim Burton did for The Nightmare Before Christmas), but because the Vinton connection makes a lot about Anyway, It's Not Disney's Pinocchio click very firmly into place - particularly the fact that it was co-directed by a man whose professional debut was as an animator on the legendarily dark and upsetting 1985 piece of childhood nightmare fuel The Adventures of Mark Twain.
This means two things. First, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is pretty much unabashedly a horror movie version of Collodi's story: a playful, silly, dollhouse-snug child-friendly horror movie, but a horror movie nevertheless. And this makes it, in a sense, one of the truest adaptations of the novel I have ever seen, because the novel is a real fucked up piece of work, certainly more fucked up than any film version I am personally familiar with (and there are a ton of films based on Pinocchio, so please don't take my personal experience as definitive). And this is true even though the script by del Toro & Patrick McHale, working from a story treatment by del Toro & Matthew Robbins, veers pretty far afield from the letter of the narrative. This Pinocchio is set in the 1930s, and situates itself in a country and in individual lives that are still recovering from the carnage of the First World War; it is furthermore a satire on Fascism that presents the first telling of the story I am aware of whose avowed theme is that it's good when Pinocchio (Gregory Mann, appropriately irritating in his breathless line deliveries) breaks the rules and refuses to obey authority figures simply because they're authority figures, and that anybody who thinks that "be obedient and you'll become a Real Boy" is a good deal is somebody who will also probably jump at the chance to sell out their neighbors. Translating 19th Century European children's fantasies into anti-Fascist parables is of course not new territory for del Toro - 2006's Pan's Labyrinth, still surely his signature movie, is pretty much exactly "anti-Franco Alice in Wonderland" - but if I am being honest, I don't entirely think this plays; it's clever moreso than actually smart, and it's kind of vague, treating Mussolini (who appears in the stop-motion flesh) as a somewhat generic "big meanie". I do not know if my feelings about the satire would improve if the main anti-Mussolini gesture was not a musical number built largely around the idea "don't you think that Mussolini poops his pants? Well, I think he poops his pants", or if that gesture is in fact the closest the satire comes to working, but it's definitely a big ol' choice that's being made.
So I hardly touched on the horror element, but let me get to the other thing that Gustafson's presence seems to particularly bring to the table, which is the craftedness of the stop motion puppets. I don't just mean that they are fussy and tangible physical, the way that we see in the beloved work of the boutique stop motion studio Laika. The work that company produces is very intentionally looking to be as smooth and slick and polished as they can manage. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is more "rough" than that, "crude" even, though you'll not the scare quotes I'm using the hedge my bets. What this mostly looks like is that some incredibly delicate handmade wood carvings made in some wonderful pocket of the German or Italian Alps in the 19th Century have come to life, all full of the elaborate and minutely-detailed curlicues of facial wrinkles, hair, beards, clothing, and shiny, lifelike glass eyes. Which is, one must admit, a pretty outstanding aesthetic to bring to bear on an adaptation of Pinocchio. It's that certain whittled quality that recalls the best of Will Vinton Productions, certainly including The Adventures of Mark Twain, where the focus is never, ever on realistic movement, but almost proudly on the stiffness and lack of articulation in the puppets. Geppetto's (David Bradley) wonderful, wonderful beard is an exceptionally clear example of this, a mess of finely shaded curls that seem to be resolutely immobile as he moves around. Ironically, or perhaps not, the character this applies to the least is Pinocchio himself, who feels more translucent and pliable than the other characters, more spidery and fluid, a plastic toy in a world of handsome wooden figurines, and thus the breath of life and modernity that pushes the world around him out of its hostile conservatism.
This all goes hand-in-hand with those horrific elements; the whole thing has a kind of odd air of movement being "wrong" for these figures; Pinocchio skittering around manically not the least of it, but there's after all a kind of unmistakable creepiness to the things made for children in the 19th Century, and this film gets right at the heart of that handsomely off-putting vibe. Not just when it's transposing the book's most creepy elements, like its pallbearing rabbits, into creepy puppets. This film's version of the Blue Fairy is a strange, angular Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton), whose mouth never moves when she speaks, creating a ghostly aura around a ghostly figure, and its manticore-like embodiment of Death (also Tilda Swinton) is basically an amped-up version of the Sprite. Even the Cricket (Ewan McGregor, whose voice is absolutely perfect for the stately, pompous, and welcoming attitude that the Cricket has in this script) has a kind of subtly revolting and disturbing look to it, one masked the broad, simple comedy required of it this time around, but still present. It's all a bit spooky and funereal in the exact way that Pinocchio ought to be and practically never is.
The real del Toro-esque part of all this is that all of the ethereal weirdness and horrific vibe is inseparable from the film's big, sloppy heart and heavily underscored emotions. This is easily the most emotionally rich of del Toro's English-language films, which isn't a terribly high standard to meet, but it's still nice to report that he got there. Right from the long prologue that dwells and dwells on Geppetto's loss of his beloved son to the random vicissitudes of war, this Pinocchio is just drunk on its own earnestness about what the parent-child relationship means, as something warm and comforting, but also as something narcissistic and selfish, in the form of a parent who just wants a small being to have as their devoted subject (it is quite explicit in linking Mussolini's national authoritarianism to the petty control of fathers over households). It is so full of love: for the character of Pinocchio and the Collodi story; for the art of puppet-making and woodcarving as depicted in the story; for the art of puppet-making as embodied in the very puppet-forward stop-motion animation we see before us. It's fussy while also feeling like things are getting messy and out of control at every turn. More than anything, it feels like ghost children playing with their toys, and not the first time I've gotten that exact feeling from a del Toro picture; but that feeling was never more right than here. It's a lovely, garish, special movie, and without question my favorite Pinocchio, out of my incomplete sampling, since Disney's original 1940 masterpiece.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
