What Guillermo Del Toro's "Pinocchio" did was restoring my faith in the power of animation, a field Disney has no longer the creative monopoly on... not only that but the film reveals all that is wrong in Disney's lousy 2022 remake, by not trying to inset social significance and on the contrary dig deeper and deeper in the roots of the Italian classic, Del Toro carved out of the raw wood of literary classicism a little piece of animated wonder, blessing it with the wand of stop motion, perhaps the most rudimentary and yet affective form of animation ever. There's something 'traditional' about that Pinocchio and by that I mean timeless, it could have been made in 2002 or even in the 90s, obviously same can't be said about the other one...
More so the film provides us a poignant and deep backstory about Gepetto, giving its full meaning to his desire to have a son, to the name Pinocchio and even subverted the idea that Gepetto was that jovial old guy with an Italian accent who was glad to have a puppet as a son... If anything the film does justice to Gepetto, portraying him as a flawed and tormented old man, drinking to forget about his lost son and in a fit of creative rage designing a little puppet, who, imperfect as it might be, gets the light of life... from a creature that is close enough to a fairy...
The film is a huge departure from the usual adventures but it knows how to keep us connected with the familiar material. The Cricket is here as the voice of reason and a little comic relief, so is a weirdly designed character close to Stromboli and we have the climactic sea sequence where Pinocchio proves his worth as a boy... but so much newness is inserted in that picture to bring a new texture to the story, its setting in fas.cist Italy in the 30s seems like a reminiscence of "Pan's Labyrinth" where fantasy and history blended in a weird harmony, Del Toro knows how to handle realism and supernatural with his own wizardry and knows how to tell a story to children without sugarcoating the adult material: violence, religion or drinking...
It might be a little upsetting for a very young audience and I wonder if Del Toro couldn't have cut a few songs because it felt a little incongruous or too Disney-like but overall, the film was a great experience and a version of Pinocchio that will live up...
More so the film provides us a poignant and deep backstory about Gepetto, giving its full meaning to his desire to have a son, to the name Pinocchio and even subverted the idea that Gepetto was that jovial old guy with an Italian accent who was glad to have a puppet as a son... If anything the film does justice to Gepetto, portraying him as a flawed and tormented old man, drinking to forget about his lost son and in a fit of creative rage designing a little puppet, who, imperfect as it might be, gets the light of life... from a creature that is close enough to a fairy...
The film is a huge departure from the usual adventures but it knows how to keep us connected with the familiar material. The Cricket is here as the voice of reason and a little comic relief, so is a weirdly designed character close to Stromboli and we have the climactic sea sequence where Pinocchio proves his worth as a boy... but so much newness is inserted in that picture to bring a new texture to the story, its setting in fas.cist Italy in the 30s seems like a reminiscence of "Pan's Labyrinth" where fantasy and history blended in a weird harmony, Del Toro knows how to handle realism and supernatural with his own wizardry and knows how to tell a story to children without sugarcoating the adult material: violence, religion or drinking...
It might be a little upsetting for a very young audience and I wonder if Del Toro couldn't have cut a few songs because it felt a little incongruous or too Disney-like but overall, the film was a great experience and a version of Pinocchio that will live up...