A Preview of “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio” at Animation is Film Festival 2022

For the first time, the Animation is Film Festival extended its programming to a second weekend, with its closing presentation of Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. Festival attendees were treated to an advance look at the film, followed by a Q&A with director Guillermo Del Toro and Oscar-winning VFX supervisor, Phil Tippett.

Del Toro Q&A Highlights

Animators are actors

“And we said, ‘let’s treat the animators as cast.’ They are actors. Animators are actors. I gathered them together and I said ‘I can promise you…you’re going to be the actors.’ I was instructing them every day. I would say ‘this is what we want. This is the gesture…but if the puppet tells you something different, do it.’ “I would say that every day and Mark (Gustafson) would say it every day and it’s because there is no other form of animation where the bond between the animator and the tool is so close.”

The initial ideas

“The tenets that you saw in the movie–I wanted the war, the loss of the child, the reincarnation through Pinocchio…’cause I thought it was interesting to have a father that begs for a child back and he doesn’t recognize him when he comes back and he takes the whole movie. We wanted–I certainly wanted–to make an anti-what-Pinocchio-had-been-before. Instead of enthroning obedience, disobedience.  Instead of everybody teaching Pinocchio and he changes, he doesn’t change as much. Everybody changes around him blah blah. All that was around 2000.” “One of the things I like from the weekly installments is… the sharp turns the tale takes and we wanted to preserve that. There’s a lot of Catholic imagery and for me, that fish is what the whale is to Jonah, is the things that are unfathomable and uncanny and huge. It can be war. It can be destiny. If you notice in the movie eventually when you see it again, all the things that are magical or otherworldly are blue, and blue is only used for those characters. The scarf of Carlo, the Book of Carlo, the blue balloon that touches the pamphlet blah blah blah, and I thought let’s do that and then let’s have Pinocchio resurrect, have the same missing limbs, as the Christ on the cross, and make it a story about fathers and sons…which includes the worst form of paternalism, which is fascism, you know? So it was if we can do all this, right? If we can combine it…that makes the song new.”

On disobedience

“…We were purely convinced that we could make these weird, strange movies and the world never ended up saying no, because we just kept going…That’s when people say, ‘do you practice disobedience?’ Every g**d**m day. Every day and I think in 30 years I knew I wanted to do a giant robot movie and a stop-motion animated movie. A ghost story and a Gothic romance and I’ve been able to do all that. I’ve written 32 screenplays. I’ve done only 12 movies, so disobedience is not a great career, but it’s a great life. It’s a great life.”

Review

At a time when audiences are blessed (?) with an abundance of Pinocchio adaptations, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio stands out as a masterpiece of stop-motion animation. More closely adhering to the source material, Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio than most of the films depicting the little wooden boy, del Toro’s version is a little darker and weightier as you might expect from his oeuvre. The story begins with kindly woodworker Geppetto and his son Carlos going about their daily lives in an idyllic dream of familial comfort and joy. The two are so happy together in fact, that we know instinctively this situation will not last. It comes to an abrupt end, leaving Geppetto a broken man, unable to move on with his life. In a drunken frenzy one night, he hammers together a distorted version of his lost son and then passes out, missing the sight of the Wood Sprite bringing it to life. While his surrogate son has no difficulty accepting him as his father, Geppetto has considerably more trouble seeing this deformed woodcarving with impulse control issues as a substitute for his lost son until he has lost him to a life on the stage and under the thumb of Count Volpe, head of a traveling carnival. The two travel considerable distances over land and under sea and through life and death in their efforts to reunite and come together as a family. Although the story of Pinocchio has been used frequently, most famously in the 1940 Walt Disney Animation version, the story has always been one of the least compelling of the major fairy tale adaptations. It’s hard to keep sympathy with a character that seems determined to flout every piece of good advice he’s given, just as it’s hard to understand why he’s so anxious to rid himself of his wooden body and take on the frailties of human form. Here, Pinocchio is given a more convincing reason for leaving Geppetto and is shown to revel in his body’s relative immortality. It all makes a little more sense here, and gives the prospect of Pinocchio turning into a real boy more gravitas, as we can see it more of a sacrifice than a reward. The animation is gorgeous, with every detail an obvious result of years of painstaking careful labor. The imagery is inventive and convincing, whether the scene is as mundane as characters going to bed, as violent as a battlefield, or as surrealistic as an afterlife made up of card games and rabbits. The voice work is expertly done as well, with an excellent turn by Ewan McGregor as Cricket, the somewhat self-centered narrator and appointed guide who gradually gets drawn into the lives of this bizarre father and son. The film includes some themes familiar to del Toro’s past work, particularly contrasting the innocence and beauty of childhood with the ugliness and violence of war. The fact that the characters spend a significant amount of time looking down the wrong way of gun barrels and bombsights makes it all the more surprising to realize that it is actually a musical–and a good one, too. The songs escape the jarring tendency of many modern animated films of making the tunes sound so contemporary that they pull the watcher out of the story’s time period. Here, the songs (many of which were written by del Toro himself) are tuneful and have a gently nostalgic air similar to songs you might remember from the film musicals back in the 70s.

At the end, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a masterful retelling of a familiar tale that accomplishes the rarely-achieved goal of making something new from old ingredients. It is a film that revolves around many different father-son relationships: Some effortlessly enjoy a close, loving bond, while others suffer through an apparent inability to accept each other for who they are. If the traditional lesson of Pinocchio is that obedience turns you into a real boy who can be accepted as a credit to his father, the lesson of del Toro’s Pinocchio might be that disobedience teaches others to accept you for who you are, and that you don’t have to change into anything to be loved as a son. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is currently playing in select cinemas, and will begin streaming on Netflix on December 9. Cast: Ewan McGregor, Gregory Mann, David Bradley, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, Finn Wolfhard, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Burn Gorman, Tim Blake Nelson Director: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson Screenwriter: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson Distributor: Netflix Running Time: 117 min Rating: PG Year: 2022