It is expected that when the famous filmmaker Guillermo del Toro confronts Pinocchio it will be a darker take on the story.
But his stop-motion film (now streaming on Netflix) pushes the imaginative, creative and honest storytelling that can be told from an adventure widely associated with the 1940 Disney animated children’s classic.
“I didn’t want to do it for the kids,” del Toro said at a screening in Toronto on Sunday. “I think animation isn’t some fucking genre for kids, it’s a medium that can explore beauty, sadness and tragedy.”
“This movies, [they’re necessary] for the economic maintenance of the medium, make no mistake. I do not say with them. No, variety.”
Del Toro called classically child-oriented animated films, with a similar structure, look and feel, “babysitting” films.
“They turn them on and leave the kids unattended because they’ve been homogenized and pasteurized, and they’re good for the parents,” del Toro said.
“If you sanitize the world for children, you destroy them… If you don’t have the conversations, and you’re going to have a conversation about life and death, whether Peanut the fucking hamster dies or you see this film, so have it already… The kids will take care of it and the art form needs it.”
What is ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’ about?
Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro takes place during the Fascist regime in Italy under Mussolini. It creates this nice synergy of a story about a puppet, in a time when everyone was expected to be obedient to the point of being, essentially, puppets of fascism.
The story begins with Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley), who loses his son Carlo (voiced by Gregory Mann) when a warplane drops a bomb that hits a local church where Geppetto and Carlo had worked to make a wooden Jesus on the cross. Geppetto is devastated by the death of his son, coping with the trauma by becoming a recluse who drinks to excess.
One night, Geppetto drunkenly creates a wooden boy, with the tree that harvested a pine cone that Carlo treasured while he was alive. Along with the piece of wood came Cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor), who lived in the trunk of the tree.
A Wood Sprite (voiced by Tilda Swinton) enters Geppetto’s house and gives Pinocchio (also voiced by Gregory Mann) the gift of life.
Geppetto wakes up surprised that his wooden creation has come to life, with Pinocchio instantly becoming a creature of concern to Podesta (Ron Perlman), a local Fascist official, but an attractive prospective carnival act to the villainous Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz).
As for the star-studded cast of this stop-motion adventure, Guillermo del Toro had some of the actors in mind as he crafted the story.
“When we were writing, some things were written specifically for, like, David Bradley,” del Toro said. “I think Ron Perlman must have been there.”
“Tilda Swinton, from the beginning, we wanted. She has this otherworldly quality that we thought was really a tremendous help. Ewan McGregor, who is the character of Cricket and the narrator of the film, has in our opinion one of the warmest voices.”
Del Toro revealed that Cate Blanchett, who plays the monkey Spazzatura who works with Count Volpe, specifically asked to be involved in the film, even though her character has no lines and only makes monkey noises.
“During alley of nightmares she said, I want to be part of Pinochio”, del Toro explained. “I said, the only part left is a monkey, and she said, I’ll play the monkey.”
An important point of exploration for At Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is the relationship between a father and his son.
“I’m a father and I’m a son, I have huge experience in both arenas,” del Toro said.
“Normally in Pinocchio, he learns to obey and he learns to be a good boy, then he turns into flesh and blood… What I learned as a father and as a son is the greatest treasure for a son or a father , it’s to do . Being able to be seen by the other is so eloquent and moving.
While in Toronto, del Toro said the goal was to make a film about a father “learning to be a real father” as opposed to a boy being a real boy.
“It became the trip on Geppetto, really,” del Toro said.
“Old World Crafts and Art”
For Guillermo del Toro, who had been working on creating this story for about 15 years, with 1,000 days of shooting the film, he wanted it to “land in a way that had the expressiveness”, using stop motion .
“The material nature of a handmade piece of animation, a beautiful artisanal exercise in sculpting, painting, but it had the sophistication of movement,” he told reporters ahead of the film’s premiere.
“We live in a time when you look at something fantastic and immediately you go to the computers… To reclaim the incredible, almost ancient craftsmanship and artistry, and the sizes and the logistics, real sets with hatches for the animators coming in,… is really awesome.
“One of our guiding principles was, if we could do it, physically produce it, we did it,” added del Toro co-manager Mark Gustafson.
As for how the characters look, there’s so much appealing beauty and texture to the visuals, and yes, this iteration of Pinocchio is slightly spooky – as it should be.
“He was carved when Geppetto was blind drunk, so if you imagine that, that was his design,” Gustafson said.
There was also a commitment to research and detail, so everything felt appropriate for the time period.
“We want to make sure that all of the costumes, the textures that we put on these puppets, everything has accuracy, historically or to scale,” character manufacturing manager Georgina Hayns told reporters. “We’re making a live-action film, but on a miniature scale.”
“We do a lot in the historical accuracy of costume details… We look at details of real clothes that maybe had elements that connected them to the character artwork.”
The collaboration in this film is incredibly evident, with a team of over 40 animators bringing this story to life.
“It’s as close as I’ve ever gotten, [in three decades], to have a circus family,” del Toro said in Toronto. “We all came into the experience and came out of it knowing each other, loving each other.”
“It’s not lip service. It’s like, almost separation anxiety. We’re so close. We know each other’s pros and cons and we talk about it very openly and beautifully.
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