Nada. Pinocchio lives on the page and in the memory of countless children, but on the screen his incarnations has hardly ever been more than the clumsy impression of an idea, however rooted. Guillermo del Toro’s age-old passion project is in some ways no exception, I hate to say, but with more than a few saving graces.
While giving up the layered narrative of Collodi’s Pinocchio and with that any trace of its freemasonic significance, del Toro drastically readapts the material to his own idiosyncrasies and disparately influenced sense of mythology making it more personal, contemporary, cinematic. Like he said, his Pinocchio is not much about a child learning to be a real boy, as it is about a father learning to be a real one. After all, children don’t need to learn how to be children, but grownups might have to learn how to be parents—when not adults too.
Guillermo de Toro’s Pinocchio is also the celebration of disobedience for the sake of affirming one’s identity, and therefore of unruliness as an act of innate bravery as opposed to one of immaturity. ‘If he’s a puppet, where are his strings?’ candidly asks Candelwick in church. ‘That’s true. Who controls you, wooden boy?’ chimes in his father, the city black-shirted podestà. ‘Who controls you?’ counters Pinocchio, to Geppetto’s embarrassment and the congregation’s muttered dismay.
By giving it a more specific historical placement than to my knowledge Pinocchio ever had, del Toro not only adds an unexpected sense of crude realism to a story broadly perceived as a timeless fantastic metaphor—he creates an exciting resonance between the stubborn, candid, rebellious attitude of our skinny little one and values that are close to intellectual resistance. Very soon we realise that Pinocchio’s magical characters have to deal with war, death, discrimination, Fascists—and the fairytale’s dramatic side suddenly gains a different gravity.
As stop-frame couldn’t have been a better choice to tell about a talking burattino and a cricket fond of Schopenhauer, the animations are mostly excellent with just a few jarring notes. The scenes where Geppetto is drunk and desperate, or when he puts Carlo and Pinocchio to bed are superb, tasteful, moving. Others moments lack the same charm. Count Volpe’s animation in particular, however deliberately theatrical and sophisticatedly mannered, feels conceived around slightly amateurish acting clichés.
Very interestingly, the comparison between this Pinocchio and Disney’s is not just an easy bait film critics picked up. Guillermo del Toro himself often raised the comparison, praising the beloved animated classic and declaring himself a proper Disney freak. The two films somehow speak to each other for how they read Collodi’s faceted novel from different yet complementary angles. Disney doesn’t get enough credit for being dark, says del Toro. As his films don’t get enough for being bright and positive.
But the most precious gift I get from him, is even prior to the film itself. As a very Mexican inspiration to Pinocchio’s central idea, he quoted a stanza from a poem by Jaime Sabines that is going to stay with me forever.
Alguien me habló todos los días de mi vida
al oído, despacio, lentamente.
Me dijo: ¡vive, vive, vive!
Era la Muerte.
