Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

It’s not surprising Guillermo del Toro (Cronos, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) has long wished upon some star to bring his version of the Italian fantasy tale The Adventures of Pinocchio to life. The popular 1883 children’s novel by Tuscan author Carlo Collodi – the third-most translated book in the world, available in over 260 languages – is a saga of (mis)adventures in which the title character (“pino”: pine; “occhio”: eye), an animated wooden puppet carved by the kindly Geppetto, encounters a series of sinister characters in fantastic settings in his quest to become a real boy. There’s some fanciful and disturbing stuff in Collodi’s episodic narrative: the duplicitous Fox and Cat who rob the naive marionette and later hang him; the lazy Pinocchio’s transformation into a donkey, thrown into the sea by a man who wants to skin him; the angry puppet master Mangiafuoco, who decides to use the wooden boy as kindling for cooking his dinner; and the Jonah-like fate of Geppetto, who’s swallowed whole by the leviathan Terrible Dogfish, to mention a few examples. With its mix of fairy tale and monsters, both human and otherwise, it’s no wonder del Toro was drawn to a story right up his nightmare alley.

Officially titled Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio — so as not to be confused with Disney+’s inferior live-action remake released on the streaming platform earlier this year – this dark but never terrifying reimagining was worth the wait, after gestating in development hell and other purgatories for nearly a decade. Tempering and amalgamating certain elements in Collodi’s classic, with a sentimental eye on what made Walt Disney’s moving 1940 adaptation arguably the finest in that studio’s animated oeuvre, the screenplay by del Toro, Patrick McHale, and Matthew Robbins sets the film in fascist Italy, with a stumpy Il Duce (already a caricature) making a cameo appearance (“I like-a puppets”) and the veil of war shrouding everyday life, particularly for la gioventù like Pinocchio and his nemesis-cum-friend, Candlewick. There’s no Pleasure Island or Blue Fairy (in her stead: a similarly conceived Wood Sprite, who animates the lifeless wooden boy) in this newly musicalized version of the tale, while much time is spent in a cobalt-pigmented afterlife in which poker-playing rabbits ferry the dead like Charon. Like all del Toro films, this Pinocchio thrives on a storytelling imagination that thinks outside the box.

The film’s stop-motion animation is amazingly fluid and almost hyperrealistic, although the faces of the younger characters, with their watery, Keane-kid orbs, tread close to the uncanny valley. But then there are the visualizations of Pinocchio and his insectile conscience, Sebastian J. (“Jiminy”) Cricket, inspired by Gris Grimly's illustrations for a 2003 edition of the book, will undoubtedly become as indelible as those characters’ incarnations in the original Disney film. Here, the boy puppet is unclothed (no Tyrolean hat or white gloves), a rough-hewn, ligneous creature of spindly appendages and unfinished nails, a prominent knothole marking where his heart would otherwise beat. And inside that opening in Pinocchio’s torso lives Mr. Cricket (terrifically voiced by McGregor), a real gentleman of a bug with a three-segmented thorax and antennae who resembles a true Acheta domesticus, albeit one with a dapper mustache. When these characters, along with Geppetto and monkey sidekick Spazzatura (simian grunts courtesy of Blanchett), exhaustedly experience emotion-filled epiphanies about mortality, acceptance, individuality, and the preciousness of time after an exciting finale on the high seas, the movie hits an exhilarating high note. The kids may hear these words, but rest assured their parents and guardians will be listening to them, perhaps teary-eyed in recognition of the wisdom they impart.