"Pinocchio": review

Geppetto (David Bradley) and Pinocchio (Gregory Mann)

Guillermo del Toro lives in an imaginative world of myth that teems with spirits and monsters and powerful magic. His visual aesthetic overlaps at least somewhat with that of Tim Burton: both directors often challenge the audience to find beauty in ugliness. In 2022's animated musical feature "Pinocchio," del Toro stocks his universe with impressive creatures like the Wood Sprite, her sister Death, ethereally floating eye-spirits, skeletal Black Rats, the gigantic Dogfish, and many others, but the greatest ugliness is reserved for the humans in the film—people like the evil carnival manager Count Volpe and all the loyalists of Il Duce, i.e., Mussolini. The movie stars the voice talents of Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Burn Gorman, Ron Perlman, John Turturro, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Tim Blake Nelson, Christoph Waltz and Tilda Swinton.

The film initially takes place during World War I. Old woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley) has a young son named Carlo (Gregory Mann), and the two live a blissful life together. One day, however, some fighter planes fly overhead and drop their remaining bombs while returning home as a way to lighten their load. One bomb inadvertently falls directly onto a church that Carlo is in, and Carlo is killed. A devastated Geppetto buries his son, planting a pine cone behind the boy's grave. Depressed, the old man turns away from his work and mourns. Twenty years pass, and Geppetto suddenly conceives of the notion of creating a new son for himself. By this time, the buried pine cone has given rise to a tall pine tree behind Carlo's grave, and in a moment of drunken passion, Geppetto fells the pine tree so he can use its wood to create a new boy. A writerly cricket named Sebastian (Ewan McGregor), dreaming of fame, has taken up residence inside the pine tree, so it comes as a shock for Sebastian when his residence tumbles down, but in this way, the cricket's life becomes intertwined with Geppetto's forever. Geppetto makes his wooden boy, who is nothing more than a lifeless puppet—a marionette with no strings, nothing to animate him. Sebastian narrates the story for us, and he tells us that there are powers in the world that watch over us. Normally, these powers do not intervene in daily life, but every once in a while, they are moved to step forth. So it is that, while Geppetto is sleeping, the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) appears and, through an enchantment, imbues the marionette with life. Sebastian witnesses this miracle, and the Sprite recruits him to be the marionette's consciousness. She also names the marionette Pinocchio (Gregory Mann again). Geppetto awakens the following morning and discovers Pinocchio, who takes the world in with naïve delight. But Pinocchio also proves to be both headstrong and destructive, and it's all Sebastian and Geppetto can do to get Pinocchio to understand the basics of proper, civilized human interaction.

The rest of the movie tells the tale of Pinocchio's various adventures. This starts with Pinocchio's appearance during mass at the local church, where he is rejected by the townspeople as an artifact of the Devil. Pinocchio sadly wonders why everyone loves and reveres the wooden Christ at the front of the church, but they hate him. We watch as Geppetto wrestles with the idea that Pinocchio, who has his own soul, is not a mere replacement for Carlo, Geppetto's original son. Pinocchio is seduced by Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) into joining Volpe's carnival, and because we're talking about Italy during its fascist period, Pinocchio gets drafted into a youth brigade by the local Podestà (Ron Perlman) to learn how to fight for Italy. Pinocchio understands none of this, of course, being all innocence. The story delves into the metaphysics of death for a being like Pinocchio: because he is not a real boy, he can be "killed" and brought to the realm of the dead any number of times, but each time he enters the realm of the dead, the hourglass determining the length of his stay is bigger, i.e., he has to remain longer. Death (also Tilda Swinton) tells Pinocchio that her sister the Wood Sprite is an optimistic one, willing to break rules when necessary, but as far as Death is concerned, rules are rules, and there are consequences for breaking them.

The movie is an emotional roller-coaster ride—humorous and sad, suspenseful and meditative. The design of Pinocchio is, at least at first, a little off-putting, but I think this was very much on purpose: del Toro wants us to make the effort to see beyond Pinocchio's body and into his soul. This is hard to do, at first, because Pinocchio comes off as rambunctious, immature, and headstrong, i.e., he's a little monster. Geppetto loses his temper, at one point, and calls Pinocchio a "burden," something he'd never have said to his human son. But as Pinocchio learns more about how the world works and what constitutes right and wrong, we begin to see that, with or without Sebastian's help, Pinocchio has a moral compass telling him what's good and bad—to the point where Pinocchio knows what to do when the time comes to save his father. By the end of the movie, I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye.

The quality of the stop-motion animation is excellent, sometimes reminding me of Laika productions like "Kubo and the Two Strings." Geppetto is made to look as gnarled and chiseled as the wood he works on, although we never learn how such an old man ended up with such a young son; Count Volpe, true to his vulpine name, is made to look like an evil fox, with swept-back hair suggesting a fox's large, pointed ears. Ron Perlman, as the Podestà, is a threatening, square-jawed presence. Volpe's harried monkey assistant Spazzatura, who endures insults and imprecations, looks eternally frazzled and stressed (spazzatura is Italian for "garbage"; voice of Cate Blanchett, who spends most of her time screeching except when Spazzatura uses marionettes to communicate in human language). The Wood Sprite and Death both showcase glowing eyes and are commanding presences, being a weird combination of pagan and biblical. The Dogfish that swallows all of the main characters is comically huge and ugly; its insides are a mess of cavernous spaces, fetid pools, and weird, slimy tunnels, making it a world unto itself. The various environments shown in the film are all evocative, whether we're talking about a sea filled with spiky mines on chains, stony fortresses, or quaint Italian towns. Visually, "Pinocchio" is a treat for the eyes.

The voice acting is also excellent. Ewan McGregor's Sebastian the cricket speaks in a lively, expressive way. Sebastian is often the comic relief as he gets inadvertently squeezed or crushed. I knew that David Bradley's voice, as Geppetto, sounded awfully familiar, but I had to look him up to discover that he's the same actor who played Argus Filch in the Harry Potter films and evil, lecherous Walder Frey in the Game of Thrones series. Tilda Swinton evokes divine awe and menace as both the Wood Sprite and Death. Gregory Mann's Pinocchio is cheerfully naïve, sounding like a young refugee from a Dickens story.

This is a darker version of the Pinocchio tale, and it doesn't end with Pinocchio becoming a real, enfleshed boy. Instead, we are challenged to accept that Pinocchio is real not because of what he's made of but because of how he acts by the end. As del Toro puts it, "To me, it's essential to counter the idea that you have to change into a flesh-and-blood child to be a real human. All you need to be human is to really behave like one, you know? I have never believed that transformation [should] be demanded to gain love." Critic Mark Kermode observes that del Toro's "Pinocchio" has a lot in common with Steven Spielberg's "AI," which is also about an animated being that is brought into a family in response to grief and loss. The rejection that Pinocchio experiences, as an animated wood marionette, also recalls Shelley's Frankenstein.

I'm morbidly tempted to watch the Robert Zemeckis live-action version of "Pinocchio" that also came out this year, but I've heard nothing but bad things about it. I should also note that it's been decades since I last watched Disney's 1940 "Pinocchio." In my mind, there are these faint, fleeting images of the long-ago cartoon. It seems that "Pinocchio" is one of those stories for which remakes have to come out every now and then, and 2022 has given us an embarrassment of Pinocchios.

With little memory of the 1940 film, and not having seen the 2022 live-action film, I can't speak comparatively, but I can say with assurance that Guillermo del Toro's version of the original 1883 Carlo Collodi story will be worth your while if you're into musicals (there's plenty of singing) that have an undercurrent of darkness and mystery to them. "Pinocchio" explores grief, loss, death, and the mustier corners of existence. It's a tale of initial horror and eventual acceptance, set against a sinister backdrop in a gloomy period of history. Del Toro says that "Pinocchio" should be thought of as the third film in a trilogy that includes "The Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth." For my money, this was a good, weird, quirky emotional journey involving an old man and an odd little boy, and how they come to terms with each other. The fascist signs in town might say "Credere, Obbedire, Combattere" (Believe, Obey, Fight), but the story teaches us that, in the end, love conquers all.