Et doesn’t happen too often that a film title, in addition to its subject, also provides the reason why this film exists at all. must give.
“Guillermo del Toros Pinocchio” defiantly proclaims its own take on a character that everyone thinks they know. But who seems to have been waiting for exactly this auteur, the creator of adult fairy tales like “Pan’s Labyrinth”, to be able to show what stuff she’s made of.
Just a few weeks ago, Robert Zemecki’s remake of the Disney cartoon classic from 1940 was slammed and disappointed the audience. The live-action film with Tom Hanks as the woodcarver Geppetto and an expectedly cute, computer-animated Pinocchio seemed too soulless for many to be able to spark any sparks from the well-known story of the bark boy who wants to be a real, good boy.
On the other hand, Del Toro and his co-director, animator Mark Gustafson (who made Fantastic Mr. Fox with Wes Anderson), ignite a fire. This Pinocchio tells of the fact that there is nothing more perfect than the imperfect, uncute, useless, as long as it is loved and its development is met with patience.
Sounds sentimental, yes. But this theme, which ultimately boils down to a very personal father-son story, runs through this work so consistently, from its long history of origin to supposedly inconspicuous motifs to its almost tactile stop-motion corporeality, that Pinocchio here achieves a new depth and also a surprising one gets heavy.
It is not for nothing that the film is only released from the age of twelve. The Mexican director says he made this film “for himself”, because thinking about his own father and about being a father has been a big part of his life for years.
Del Toro is checking in
Which: Jason Schmidt/NETFLIX
Del Toro begins his story with Geppetto at the grave of his son Carlo, not in the cozy workshop idyll. Even the flashback to happier times, a father-child paradise of self-sufficiency shimmering in warm colors, is porous: Carlo rocks, gazing happily at the sky, while the metal age drills into the picture there in the form of military pilots.
The boy doesn’t understand what they mean. The ten-year-old dies in a bomb attack during the First World War. Geppetto has been a broken man ever since. The tree that has been growing on Carlo’s grave ever since sprouted from a remarkably even pine cone, which Carlo had found himself according to his father’s instructions – “it must be complete”. It seems as if del Toro is burying the perfect Pinocchio as we know him, with his childlike scheme and his bright willingness to adapt, with this history of Carlo.
A horror child who calls “Dad”.
In the sorrowful suffocation, Geppetto now falls this pine tree, almost tearing it apart himself: on the one hand, his despair is directed at the loss of the perfect child, but at the same time his anger is directed against the beauty that continues to exist, this tree, which is at the gap in his own life indicates.
He drags the wooden cadaver into his workshop and carves, hammers and screws a son substitute out of it, crooked and imprecise and asymmetrical. When this doll gets up the following morning, not yet knowing where up and where down, what is good and what is bad, it pushes itself upside down into the picture on spider legs, warbles a little song with twisted limbs and smashes everything in the process. A horror child shouting “Dad!” to its horrified creator.
Guillermo del Toro fought for this film for 15 years, the project repeatedly stagnated and threatened to fail. The effort was immense, because the director wanted to shoot the story, first filmed by Giulio Antamoro in 1911, in stop motion from the start. He once justified this by saying that no art form has influenced his life and work more than animation and that he has never felt such a deep personal connection to any character as to Pinocchio.
Netflix finally secured the rights in 2018. In his own words, Del Toro takes the original story written by Carlo Collodi in 1883 more than previous film adaptations, but develops it further: Collodi’s Pinocchio is in some respects perverted and creepy, even slightly necrophilic. So already half a del Toro.
The Pinocchio drawings published in 2002 by the American children’s book illustrator Gris Grimly served as a visual source of inspiration. Del Toro Collodis changed characters and parts of the plot and transplanted them into the time of Italian fascism.
As in “Pan’s Labyrinth” or “The Devil’s Backbone”, children’s stories set against the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War, the filmmaker fuses the fantastic with the horror of real historical distortions. This isn’t a set of historical pedantry. It takes the Nazi club to beat the thwarted core out of the fairy tale.
Graf Volpe has the voice of Christoph Waltz
What: Netflix
In the original, Pinocchio and other disobedient children become donkeys after they have been allowed to let off steam in the land of games. Discipline and obedience, still pedagogical values for Collodi, are equated with inhuman foolishness for del Toro, only dictators and puppeteers rely on them.
Or, as the stubby film Mussolini puts it: “I like puppets.” His soldiers are mindless material and all the more valuable if, like Pinocchio, they survive fire, traffic accidents and bullets. The fascist setting is necessary in order to develop the central and contemporary ethical motive in it: the ability to say no, the refusal to participate.
Until he gets the hang of it, del Toros Pinocchio isn’t just the good guy. He mimics the crucified and doesn’t understand why everyone loves this wooden figure but not him. He sings war propaganda texts on a puppet stage to a melody that Geppetto once sang to Carlos good night.
He’s a distorted image, and as such he doesn’t make it easy for his audience to like him at first. In addition, this Pinocchio is made of bulky wood, no matter how much he crows, he is “a boy of flesh and blood”.
At such lies, his nose grows into a veritable sapling, to the applause of those who think his blatant untruths are a show of genius. The proximity to the populists is there.
The camera moves almost incessantly when the figures perform seemingly casual, laboriously handcrafted gestures or when their facial expressions reflect ambivalent nuances between sadness and horror, joy and regret. The sweet musical numbers by Alexandre Desplat, appropriately recorded entirely on woodwind instruments, unfold a certain potential for eye-rolling, especially in the German dubbed version.
Fox and tomcat don’t appear at all
Ironically commented by the cricket, which starts to sing several times and each time gets a painful one on the chitin shell, until it is finally allowed to finish singing its swinging song of optimism in the credits. The chimera of musical lard and gloom is one of the powerful oddities of this film, which gradually become more and more accessible.
The mangy duo of fox and cat doesn’t appear at all, instead del Toro turned the clumsy puppet theater director Feuereater into the affected, tea-drinking Count Volpe with fox-red sticking out quiffs, in the original cosmopolitan and arrogant voiced by Christoph Waltz.
Even the narrator, the cricket man who lives at heart level in Pinocchio with writer’s ambitions (original voice: Ewan McGregor), does not look cute with his pupilless insect eyes as in other film adaptations, but rather like the cockroach-like relative of the horrible but benevolent supernatural beings.
From Collodi’s blue fairy, del Toro makes two sisters, one with a horned mask and snake tail, embodies death, the other, four-winged, breathes life into Pinocchio. Voiced by Tilda Swinton, they are the boy’s real teachers: They teach him the truism, which is difficult for an immortal wooden doll to grasp, that human life is limited and therefore so precious.
Without laying it on too thickly, del Toro plays through the father-son relationship in three ways: in addition to Geppetto and Pinocchio, Count Volpe and his downtrodden monkey Spazzatura as well as the fascist mayor and his son, who refuses to commit fratricide, also reflect variants of the father’s demand on the offspring, themselves conform to an ideal image in order to earn fatherly love. Those fathers who really have something to learn here.
Once Geppetto gave his Pinocchio a primer. “I love it,” the wooden puppet cheers and jumps around enthusiastically. Then she sits down and asks kindly, “What is that?” This Pinocchio teaches us that being able to penetrate something and define its purpose is not a prerequisite for taking it to heart.