Guillermo del Toro gets personal with ‘Pinocchio’
There’s a reason why Guillermo del Toro has his name attached to his long-aborning “Pinocchio” that streams globally on Netflix this Friday.
It’s because while this puppet tale is inspired by Carlo Collodi’s classic Italian fairy tale, del Toro’s take is intensely personal, with no resemblance to Disney’s animated adaptation or any other.
It’s now dream come true time for the Oscarwinning
Mexican filmmaker who has been obsessed with fairy tales and horror stories since childhood. At 58, del Toro has been waiting 20 years to make his “Pinocchio” his way, in stop motion with distinct changes in settings, characters and events.
“This is a sort of reinterpretation of the myth,” del Toro offered during a Zoom interview. “Some people would say, ‘Well, this is going to be dark.’ I think it’s actually full of light, a movie full of love.”
The tale begins with Geppetto the wood carver heartbroken when Carlo his only son is killed. He carves a wooden puppet he names Pinocchio who comes to life, moving without strings. With his thin wooden arms and legs and long wooden nose, he doesn’t look at all like a boy.
The time is 1930s Fascist Italy with dictator Benito Mussolini making an appearance.
Not only did del Toro co-direct, produce, coscript and compose the songs, he never relented on making his vision real via stop-motion. “That was very important for me. That you got that tactile beauty of something that is hand painted, hand carved, and hand animated.
“I found it very moving to tell a story about a puppet that doesn’t behave like a puppet. In a world of people that think and behave with obedience — and they think they’re not puppets! But they’re all puppets in a stop motion movie,” he laughed. “It may sound a little mad, but that was really important artistically.”
Creating in this extremely slow process consumed “nearly 1,000 work days,” he said.
Pinocchio, emphatically wood, not flesh prompts the question: “Can he win the condition of a human for the audience without having to look like a real boy? And can people come to love him exactly as he is without his transforming into a cute little guy? That was very intentional.
“And the love story between the father and the son means Geppetto and Pinocchio learn compassion and love rather than Pinocchio learning to obey, which I’ve always been against. Disobedience is a virtue. Disobedience is the beginning of the real self. I wanted to make that clear the more we touched upon it.”