Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio across regional Victoria on March 30, 2023.

(M) ★★★★

Director: Guillermo del Toro.

Cast: (voices of) Gregory Mann, David Bradley, Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, Ron Perlman, Burn Gorman, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Tim Blake Nelson, Tilda Swinton, John Turturro.

"Sign this, and Netflix owns your soul."

The Wall Street Journal says there are over 50 adaptions of Carlo Collodi's 1883 serial The Adventures of Pinocchio. There a version where Pinocchio goes into space. There's Roberto Benigni's ill-fated take where the boy-puppet is played by the then-50-year-old Benigni. There's even a porn version (hint: it's not his nose that grows).

By and large the original story, which is dark and strange, has proven eminently adaptable due to its core moral of "be good and you will be rewarded". It's a simple karmic idea with a hint of magic and fantasy that works in a range of settings, including war-time Italy, such as in this masterfully animated take from iconic director Guillermo del Toro. 

Just as Disney's acclaimed 1940 version cherry-picks from Collodi's story, so too does del Toro's. Pinocchio (voiced by Mann) is crafted by Geppetto (Bradley) after the woodworker's son Carlo was killed in a WWII bombing raid. Initially bad-behaved and ill-mannered, Pinocchio runs away to a circus to make money for Geppetto and no longer be a "burden" on the old man. But Geppetto, who is joined by raconteur insect Sebastian J Cricket (McGregor), is desperate to find Pinocchio and bring him home. 

It's hard to think of a director better suited to working in the world of stop-motion animation than del Toro. Even his lesser films such as Pacific Rim and Crimson Peak are visually stylish, but working in the stop-and-go minutiae of this kind of process seems to give the Mexican director the perfect opportunity to paint masterpieces on the screen. The models and sets put together by his team are works of art themselves. And in the service of this intriguing story, with exquisite lighting and great voice performances, it's top-shelf stuff.

The source material is also well suited to del Toro. His passion for a war-time backdrop (see also The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth) works well, but it's the strangeness of the original material that is most fitting. He revels in the darkness of the story and takes it to odd new places, including a fascist boys camp with a cameo from Mussolini. 

One thing it falters with is the moral at the heart of Collodi's tale. While Walt Disney's classic gave us Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's conscience, del Toro's version separates puppet from cricket, leaving the morality lesson to be a little foggier and ill-defined. It becomes more of a series of unfortunate events, as opposed to an inner journey to goodness, but is no less entrancing for this - just perhaps less impactful.

We reached peak Pinocchio last year, with three new versions released. This is the only one to bother watching. It's a wonderful take on an old story, with a hint of darkness, and some truly masterful animation.