Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

The very short review of this film is “gorgeous but WTF was that?”

I have read, although a long time ago, a translation of the book (which was the first complete release of the story) and, like a lot of fairy stories, the original is a LOT darker than the Disney movie for example (although some of the weird bits of the Disney film come from the book more or less intact), and some of that darkness comes through clearly. The scene where Pinocchio first comes to life felt pretty familiar for example and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a 19th century Italian story, the heavy Catholicism in this adaptation felt familiar too.

However, I’m pretty sure Collodi didn’t predict the first and second world wars, the rise of Mussolini and the like, but Il Duce is a character we see as del Toro's obsession with fascism coming through.

This takes the story into almost pure del Toro, I say almost pure because there are easter eggs from the original thrown in. Why is the boy Pinocchio befriends called Candlewick? I can’t completely answer that, but I can partially - Candlewick was a character in the original book. (Wikipedia suggests it’s because he’s very tall and thin, like a wick in the book, that detail didn’t survive the animation process.) We have a monkey called Spazzatura (Trash) who loosely replaces the cat from the Disney movie. But the cat and the fox from the book are much, much darker characters.

Generally speaking I like Guillermo del Toro, but this felt weird? I’m not a parent but there were big chunks that I’d feel really uncomfortable letting a visiting child watch. However, as an adult there were too many moments that felt uncomfortable for me too. Not uncomfortable in a horror movie “creepy but good” way, just confusing and ill-judged. Both Spazzatura and Sebastian J. Cricket (why rename him? I assume copyright reasons and the original is just “the talking cricket”) get a huge amount of abuse that would never be allowed with a real animal. There’s obviously a long history of animals getting smacked around in cartoons historically - Tom and Jerry, Wily. E. Coyote and many others, I’m thinking of you - but this was enough that I noticed and commented on it. In fact, it felt gratuitous. I guess with Pixar etc we don’t have anyone making these sorts of cartoons any more so I assume this is a call back to that era of cartoons? But it just felt weird and decidedly uncomfortable to me.

Honestly, that last sentence could really be used to sum up the majority of the film once it drifted further and further away from the source material. The story was odd. Not every story needs a moral and it’s certainly hard to discern one in this film. Maybe the rather mournful “all things shall pass” or “love means sacrifice” both of which I agree with but seem rather adult. Ironically that old Disney film with its pretty clear moral virtually pasted on the moral from the book. Maybe we’re supposed to read something into the fascism, but our main figure that represents that is painted more as an arsehole and a bad dad than a real figure of evil. It feels like del Toro is a kind of resolving his feelings about fascism in Spain but since he’s Mexican I’m not quite sure why he has them? If he’d grown up in Spain it would make more sense to me. I’m also left not 100% sure what his feelings are? Because the Podestà is set up as a bad dad it doesn’t feel like it resolves to “fascism was wrong” and while they are arguably not as bad as the Nazis, I think it’s degrees of evil and that doesn’t come through as clearly as I’d like.

I don’t mind films that lack a moral, although it feels odd for this film though. It’s not the only confusing choice. One of my favourite (professional) film reviewers, before the BBC stopped the show and he stopped his podcast, used to say he admired films from young film makers that showed ambition and tried too much but fell short rather than any film maker than lacks ambition. But del Toro is not young. He’s older than me. It feels like he threw a load of half-formed ideas at the screen, waited to see what congealed and said “look, my latest movie.” Maybe he can’t focus on one project for the four years this apparently took to make - it’s all in stop motion after all, so four years doesn’t seem unreasonable. It’s beautiful on the eye, but it’s a mess on the mind.

Let me illustrate with a mild spoiler. We all know Geppetto gets swallowed by the whale. In the book this is a “great dogfish” which was a common term in the original dialect for a shark. In this film, it’s called a giant dogfish, and from the outside, in one shot, looks rather like a dogfish. But it’s mouth has multiple rows of teeth, like a shark. Let the easter eggs roll! And yet it has a blowhole, like a whale. Albeit a blowhole on a kind of trunk. What drugs were you taking when you designed THAT model of some imaginary sea mammal Guillermo? It’s not anything and, ok, it doesn’t have to be anything, but you named it after a real creature, you threw back to the original name and meaning, and then added weird blowholes… why? Expand those sorts of choices over the whole movie and you have some idea of what it’s like watching this. None of the parts seem to fit together, seemingly at any scale from just a fish/mammal to the overarching plot, and they don’t make sense internally in any way.

Honestly, it’s worth watching a bit of this, it really is beautiful, but don’t stay for it all, unless you like really weird and hard to follow. There are films I’ve struggled to get to grips with in my first watch that have inspired me to go back and rewatch them. But this is just such a mess I don’t want to watch it again and hope there’s something there.

Bechdel Test: Fail. There are female voice actors but there’s a dearth (not quite total absence) of female characters, named or otherwise.

Ko Test: Null. As is normal with an animated film, I opt for null. It could be argued that it should be fail because we don’t have any WOC portrayed but does the blue fairy count?

Russo Test: Fail. There are lots of characters where we don’t see their sexuality, or they’re children, monkeys or whatever. But everyone we do see is straight.