The paint has yet to dry on director Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio, and another Oscar winner, Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro, has already released his adaptation of Carlo Collidi’s seminal children’s novel. Co-directed by Mark Gustafson, the film is a wholly original retelling of a story that, despite (or perhaps because of) its overbearingly melancholic nature, has remained relevant across generations. That, and how malleable the story is for any filmmaker to come in and project their anxieties onto it.
Though he has now become synonymous with his warm affection for the marginalized, there was a time when he made films about children against the backdrop of war. While Zemeckis’ recent film, a remake, stayed true to the original Disney classic in its story told by the numbers of a familiar cautionary tale, del Toro’s take is more reminiscent of his previous films.
Pinocchio is the conclusion of a spiritually connected trilogy that del Toro began with The Devil’s Backbone in 2001 and continued with Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006. Each of these films owes a creative debt to director Víctor Erice’s classic Spanish cinema , The spirit of the hive. – a strongly political film that the director slipped under the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco using symbolism and metaphor. The story was about a little boy’s obsession with the American film Frankenstein, which is important here, because del Toro’s great “take” on Pinocchio is reinventing the character as a version of Frankenstein’s monster.
In his film, the creation of Pinocchio is not a magical moment of artistic expression, but almost a laboratory experiment gone wrong. “It’s a house of horrors,” exclaims Sebastian J Cricket, who serves as the story’s narrator. Later, when Pinocchio disobeys his “father” Geppetto’s instructions and shows up at the church, the devotees scream and shout, calling him an “abomination” and a “demon”. The tone is slightly ominous and somewhat symmetrical to the material, which has long been misclassified as a children’s story.
It shows how differently the same story can be interpreted by different directors. This thought experiment also extends to adaptations by Matteo Garrone and Roberto Benigni. This difference in interpretations extends to executions as well. Pinocchio’s Cricket conscience in this film is not the carnival barker played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in Zemeckis’ film, but a Paul Theroux-esque writer immersed in writing his memoirs after venturing around the world. And unlike Zemeckis’ film, or any other version of Pinocchio you’ve seen over the years, del Toro’s beautiful adaptation tackles the dark themes of obedience and ostracism, fatherhood and fascism of the source material in a more direct way. For example, Geppetto’s grief over the loss of his son is not simply implied, but displayed on screen with unshakeable clarity. In this film, Geppetto is indistinguishable from the city drunk, wasting his last years pining for his lost son even after his wooden creation has come to life.
There’s something inherently macabre about stop-motion animation, which lends itself beautifully to del Toro’s cinematic aesthetic, both the underlying sadness of his stories and his outlandish creature designs. His personification of Death, for example, moves and sounds like something only he could have created. And then there are the political undertones of the film, because what are people living under an authoritarian regime but puppets, controlled by invisible strings? Del Toro’s Pinocchio isn’t the first animated film to address fascism; Heck, it’s not even the first stop-motion film to tackle fascism, but it’s definitely the best.
