Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: Sculpted to Life

All Pinocchio adaptations are about the parent or guardian’s responsibility to teach moral lessons to children so that they can be fully human—though in del Toro’s version the father figures also often learn from their younger charges, instead of the other way around. His film also operates on a second, more abstract level, showing the relationship between unformed individuals and the societal values that forge their beliefs. The only reason the parent state doesn’t get its hooks into Pinocchio instantly is because it doesn’t know he exists until fairly late in the story. Once Pinocchio becomes a recruit, the state’s conditioning supersedes all other influences. In roughly the same narrative spot where the Disney version placed the pure-nightmare-fuel Pleasure Island sequence, wherein Pinocchio and other gullible lads are ensnared by their appetites and transformed into donkeys to work in salt mines, del Toro builds an equally disturbing but more politically trenchant sequence in which Pinocchio and other young men are ensnared with patriotic clichés, then deployed as tools of war.

This is also, in its way, a religious film. Why would God allow war, fascism, and other organized systems of inhumanity? Such questions are woven throughout, and Pinocchio never makes the error of trying to answer them definitively. Del Toro puts a very Christian (and often big-C Catholic) frame around the story. As an inquiry into why a supposedly caring deity would allow suffering and injustice, the film is akin to a Martin Scorsese or Robert Bresson drama of suffering and transcendence—or, for that matter, one of Terrence Malick’s theological-historical cine-poems. Poor Carlo is contemplating an unfinished statue of the crucified Christ in the local church when he’s killed by a random explosive dropped by a bomber crew on the way back to base (“to make their ballast lighter,” the cricket’s voice-over tells us, a phrase worthy of Catch-22). Geppetto grieves for years afterward, and the statue of Christ remains unfinished. A mordant touch: the movie crosscuts between Geppetto kneeling at his son’s grave, contemplating his irreplaceable loss, and the priest and three altar boys back at the church, crossing themselves at the miracle of the destroyed roof and the untouched statue.

Technically as well as thematically, this is a film of staggering ambition and ingenuity done for what is, in live-action Hollywood terms, a pittance. But the scaled-down (in every sense) production seems to have freed the movie to take flight into what Willy Wonka called a world of pure imagination. Like all of del Toro’s work, it looks backward and forward at the same time. The puppets and miniature costumes and sets are made from real materials, their scale varying depending on whether they’re seen in close-up or wide shot. The movements are done the old-fashioned way: by having animators move the characters a little bit, shoot one frame, then repeat, over and over again for months. But the film was previsualized with a fluidity that would have been impossible in the days of pen-and-ink storyboarding, and the use of CGI and digital compositing gave the crew near-absolute control over every image, including the ability to correct mistakes and make style or timing tweaks during postproduction.

Too many modern movies overuse these tools, polishing every frame to sterility. Not Pinocchio. It strives to put across the sense that, in addition to everything else, this film is a record of things that were actually made. As befits its main character, it’s a sculpted work. You can see the wood grain, and you could count every tuft of wool on a character’s coat collar and every chisel mark on Pinocchio’s limbs and face, were you so inclined. The direction makes a point of grounding even the overtly epic images. Notice, for instance, the “heaviness” of the fatal bomb as it falls to earth during the thunderstorm, as well as the low-angled shot of Geppetto in front of the church watching the planes roar against the sky: There’s nothing fussy or acrobatic about these images or any others. They get the point across in such a direct way that you don’t think about the planning behind each choice.

Not content to channel only movies, del Toro’s fantasies reach so far back into literature, religion, and mythology that they seem to exist outside time. We see this inclination on display again in Pinocchio. Its Italian landscapes are forced-perspective dioramas influenced by everything from Pre-Raphaelite landscape painting to Terry Gilliam’s movies (especially Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, handsomely produced fantasies with down-and-dirty countercultural sensibilities). Rather than trot out another rotoscoped ingenue in a dress, Pinocchio represents the Blue Fairy, who intervenes in the hero’s journey, as a mouthless, saucer-eyed, ethereal creature, somewhere between an extraterrestrial ambassador and a benevolent Harpy. Before assuming this form to visit Pinocchio, she is but one member of a school of translucent, one-eyed, tadpole-tailed elementals that float in the forest near Geppetto’s house. They could be holdovers from the ocean’s birth, or ageless beings from a Hayao Miyazaki film.