LONDON: Those still reeling from Disney’s bizarre live-action remake of “Pinocchio” earlier this year can take solace from the director’s name above the credits of Netflix’s stop-motion animation version of the same story. Guillermo del Toro, perhaps better than any current filmmaker, knows how to wring the weird out of a tall tale, and so it proves with his take on Carlo Collodi’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio.”
Rather than the whimsical fantasy of Disney’s 1940’s hand-drawn animation (and its decidedly inferior successor), del Toro sets his “Pinocchio” in Fascist Italy between the two World Wars and, as you may expect, imbues his wooden boy with a far darker origin story than that of a kindly old man granted a wish by a fairy.
Carpenter Geppetto (David Bradley from “Harry Potter” and “Game of Thrones”) loses his young son during a bombing raid and, in a drunken, grief-stricken rage, hacks down the tree by the graveside, whittling it into a puppet in a frenzied, Frankenstein-esque sequence that is as much about unfathomable grief as it is about fairy tales. Tilda Swinton’s wood sprite breathes life into the boy, and tasks Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian J Cricket (who had been living in the tree) with acting as Pinocchio’s guide. Though initially horrified by his own creation, Geppetto slowly warms to the young puppet, only to see him snatched away by the sinister Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) and Ron Perlman’s government official. Sebastian and Geppetto, having realized the danger Pinocchio is in, set out to bring him home.
Del Toro’s take makes some startingly dark turns. (Supplied)
To be clear, this is definitely not a Disney movie. Del Toro’s take makes some startingly dark turns — at one point, Perlman’s Podestà wonders aloud what the Italian army could do with an invincible wooden soldier — and Pinocchio’s descent into the underworld is every bit as surreal and visually arresting as you’d expect from the creator of “Pan’s Labyrinth.”
But there remains a heart-warming sentiment at the center of this stunningly beautiful, intriguing movie. The voice performances are all great (McGregor’s in particular), but the lovingly created world, and its painstakingly animated inhabitants, are breathtaking. To wring such an emotional experience from such well-known characters is a rare skill, but one which del Toro has in abundance.
