Directed by: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson
Starring: David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz
Rated PG, 117 minutes
What, exactly, makes a kids’ movie a kids’ movie? Surely we all know one when we see it: there’s probably a child protagonist, a good deal of physical humor, a bright palette, maybe some talking animals and some songs. The peril is mild and the ending is happy. Much of the canon of children’s cinema reflects a conventional wisdom that children should be treated to pleasant spectacle, that they’re too young for the scenes of violence and suffering that we find in so many films for adults.
Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio,” an outstanding stop-motion adaptation of the classic Italian story of a wooden doll brought to life, is an unapologetic outlier among kids’ movies. Chief among the novelties of this new version is its setting, moved forward several decades from the 19th century and into the 1930s, amid the fascist regime in Italy and the growing shadow of war. Characters—children included—give stiff-armed salutes and hang propaganda on the walls and sing in praise of warfare. This historical setting grounds the movie in a time and place that adults will recognize more readily than children, but cruelty and evil are front and center, obvious to any audience. This may be the first kids’ movie in which Benito Mussolini makes an appearance.
Even without its historical context, the film is heavy with sadness. Rather than a whimsical woodworker wishing for a real boy, this version of Geppetto has crafted the titular doll in a fit of drunken sorrow, adrift in grief after the death of his only son. For much of the film, Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley of “Game of Thrones” in one of the finest voice acting performances in recent memory) looks and sounds bewildered, an old man already at his wit’s end suddenly thrust into an overwhelming adventure. He is weighed down by heavy burdens, from his grief to his solitude to his penitent devotion to the Catholic Church. We are, in other words, a long way from the comforting optimism of “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
Guillermo del Toro (“Nightmare Alley”) and his co-director, Mark Gustafson (making his feature film debut), fill this sad tale with beautiful set pieces and memorable characters, all rendered in rich but grotesque detail. Pinocchio himself, befitting this darker adaptation, looks less like the wide-eyed boy of the 1940 Disney cartoon and more like, well, wood. His spindly legs and tree-ring eyes make him look inhuman; when villagers first catch sight of him, they call him a demon, and it’s not hard to see why. Voiced buoyantly by Gregory Mann (“Victoria”), he is eventually a charismatic lead, but between his unvarnished appearance and the presence of many decidedly uncuddly animals (from a cricket to a circus monkey to four rabbit skeletons dressed in black), this kids’ movie is lacking much of the cuteness you might expect.
Still, this is, undeniably, a movie for kids, and many of the other touchstones of the genre are present. An inviting and ever-present score by Alexandre Desplat (“The Shape of Water”) conveys us jovially from scene to scene, while slapstick jokes provide welcome comic relief. In the film’s best running gag, Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor, “Obi-Wan Kenobi”), our narrator and Pinocchio’s rarely-heeded chaperone, attempts to sing a song about his father but gets repeatedly interrupted before he can finish the first line. Even in darker scenes, when del Toro broaches subjects like death and deceit and the horrors of war, the film never loses its spirit of childlike wonder.
A few peculiar choices crop up along the way to raise an eyebrow or two. The script juggles many subplots and occasionally fumbles them, connecting scenes with a loose logic that we have no choice but to accept at face value. And in the film’s more religious moments, it leans on crucifixion imagery, making Pinocchio a dubious Christ figure. As if all this weren’t strange enough already, two-time Oscar winner Cate Blanchett (“Tár”) here provides the wordless voicings of a monkey. But if the film is full of oddities, it is no less rewarding for it. Guillermo del Toro has made his “Pinocchio” a spectacle of uncommon splendor, proving once again that his greatest gift as a filmmaker is to make the macabre feel as familiar and comforting as a bedtime story.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 12/16/22.