This is a Pinnochio deeply embedded in its 1930s Fascist Italy setting, where the leader of Gepetto’s village is a fascist government official (Ron Perlman, booming and frightening) who is disgusted at Pinocchio’s unnatural existence before he gleefully realizes that the puppet’s immortality makes him the perfect soldier. Where Disney would sand down Collodi’s original story into a more wholesome fairytale about good sons and ideal fathers, del Toro sharpens and hones Pinocchio into a story that embraces disobedience as a stand-in for free will and rebellion. So begins a tale that many of us are familiar with, but del Toro’s Pinocchio almost immediately takes us down a twistier and more gnarled path. When he wakes, he’s shocked to meet an energetic puppet brimming with curiosity and a lust for life - and an often misplaced eagerness to please his father. Little does he know that a kindly Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton, ethereal as always) visits the puppet in the night to give him life, nor that the grumpy cricket (Ewan McGregor, hilariously flowery) living in the tree has been tasked to be the puppet’s conscience. ![]() When a particularly strong wave of grief hits him on a rainy night while visiting his son’s grave, Gepetto chops down the tree that grew from his son’s pine cone and his own tears and carves it into a wooden puppet. But a stray bomb kills Carlo, sending Gepetto deep into a liquor-induced depression. Gepetto, singing the first of the movie’s charming songs in dedication to his son, adores the 10-year-old Carlo, who is the perfect son in every way. Gepetto (David Bradley) is the well-respected resident woodcarver of a small town in 1930s Italy. It’s the themes of Collodi’s novel that Guillermo del Toro picks up and runs with, but in classic fashion, the Nightmare Alley and Pan’s Labyrinth filmmaker reshapes Pinocchio into something far stranger, sharper, and better.ĭel Toro’s Pinocchio begins with a man and his dear son, but not the ones you think. But Collodi’s dark, grim, morality play was a groundbreaking piece of literature that married a whimsical fable with social realist art - a much deeper and more grisly saga than the story of a wooden boy whose nose simply grows when he tells a lie. The pop culture dominance of Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio, itself a disarmingly dark tale that’s traumatized generations of children, has obscured the legacy of Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 children’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. Put them together in a visually stunning stop-motion movie (set in war-torn fascist Italy) and you get a bewitching animated masterwork that’s one of the best movies of 2022. The other is the original fairytale lesson on the perils of disobedience. ![]() One is our greatest teller of disobedient fairytales. Guillermo del Toro and Pinocchio are a match made in heaven.
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