“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” (2022)

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Grade: B

Mexican director Guillermo del Toro was only partially correct when he said that stop-motion animation “can go straight to your emotions in a way that no other medium can.” The uncanniness of his 2022 Pinocchio adaptation is visually profound, yet the striking imagery isn’t enough to hide his questionable deviations from the storyline. A few more notes on Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio:

Directing:

Co-directed with Mark Gustafson (the animation director of Fantastic Mr. Fox), del Toro’s Pinocchio is stunning to behold: a new high-water mark in stop-motion puppetry animation. That’s because del Toro treats it no different than his live action films — imagine Nightmare Alley projected through a dream. Every scene is dazzling, yet the most memorable are the impressive depictions of the biblically accurate angels, who appear sporadically throughout the film to impart existential messages to the immortal Pinocchio.

Acting:

Just like the animation, the voice acting is superb. Ewan McGregor is a convivial Sebastian J. Cricket, David Bradley is a sympathetic Gepetto, Christoph Waltz is a verbose Count Volpe (though that schtick is growing tiresome) and Gregory Mann is an (intentionally) imperfect Pinocchio. Kudos to the casting department.

Writing:

Del Toro transfers the setting of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel to fascist Italy in the 1930s, where Pinocchio’s struggles to learn about humanity are colored against Benito Mussolini’s senseless violence, showing how everyone who follows his ideology are also puppets. Yet the social commentary is shallow and shoehorned for dramatic effect, ultimately boiling down to nothing deeper than “fascism = bad.” Sure, political evil is applicable to every era, but the closest the film comes to calling it out is by giving Mussolini crude animation and a song about Il Duce pooping his pants. It’s more condescending to us the viewers than it is to fascist dictators.

By straying away from modern-day parallels and failing to explain historical context, the inclusion of WWII-era Italian fasism is just cheap artistic reductionism. On the other hand, Del Toro’s inclusion of multidimensional angelic beings adds some intriguing existentialism to an otherwise overly sentimental adaptation.

Music:

The original score by composer Alexandre Desplat, which incorporates elements of Italian folk music, is quite pleasant. But the songs sung by the characters are quite unnecessary and unmemorable and unmelodic. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio doesn’t want to be a musical, so why include these terrible tunes? Del Toro is trapped by the notion that this needs to be a story for children, which is why he panders with songs and safe antiwar parables.

Ending (SPOILERS):

The film starts out very promising, enveloping us in its exquisite animation and fascinating us with its allusions of the afterlife. However, by the end, del Toro has created a bit of a mess. The fascist subplots are swallowed up by a whale, and it doesn’t seem like any character has learned anything of value (Sebastian J. Cricket might actually be more superfluous to the plot than Mussolini). The cloying sentiments of the epilogue will certainly stir some teary-eyed emotion, but the overall messaging becomes muddled. I’ll tell you that the only good thing (and it is very good indeed) about Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is the animation, and I won’t be lying.

“What happens, happens, and then we are gone.” – Sebastian J. Cricket

Why Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio gets a B:

The stunning stop-motion animation is worth the price of admission alone — probably the high-water mark in the medium’s history — but the clumsy social commentary brings down an otherwise enchanting fable.

---