Del Toro gives Pinocchio genuine soul

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

PG cert, 117 min ★★★★★

Dirs Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson

Voices Gregory Mann, Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Christoph Waltz, Ron Perlman, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton

A director including their own name in the title of their latest film? It might sound like an unconscionable ego-trip. But in the case of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, it’s more like a necessary manoeuvre – because this achingly beautiful stopmotion adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s fairy tale has to be distinguished at all costs from the dead-eyed CG-plus-live-action take released barely three months ago on Disney+.

The Mexican director of The Shape of Water and Crimson Peak has ingeniously relocated Collodi’s story to Fascist Italy, where an entire generation of young men and boys are having their strings pulled by Mussolini and his lackeys. Into this inauspicious historical moment clatters our hero (voiced by Gregory Mann), a mannequin carved by the woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley) from the pine tree that grew from the grave of his son Carlo, who perished during the Great War 10 years beforehand.

Brought to life by a blueglowing wood sprite (Tilda Swinton) – the angelic sister of Death herself (also Swinton, of course) – Pinocchio becomes a singing, dancing, mischief-making rebuke to the encroaching new order, and his escapades take on an extra jab of carnival defiance.

Del Toro may be the big brand name here, but his Pinocchio feels every inch an all-hands-on-deck effort. It’s co-produced by the Jim Henson Company, the Los

Angeles-based animation house Shadowmachine and Netflix Animation, and is co-directed by Mark Gustafson, who also served as supervising animator on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox.

Ewan McGregor’s charmingly high-flown Sebastian J Cricket resembles the spindly bugs from Henry Selick’s James and the Giant Peach – and while Pinocchio is the only wooden role here, his human friends and foes all look pleasingly whittled and gouged as well. Every design choice feels like a loving nod to the medium’s knobbly heritage.

Admittedly the script, cowritten by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, is perhaps a little too slick when it comes to hustling the plot towards the next moral lesson. But the storytelling itself is unashamedly old-fashioned, and forays into the political and the macabre are all tailored to younger viewers. For parents who itch to show their offspring Del Toro’s 2006 fantasy masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth – before remembering it’s 15-rated, and that it crawls with terrifying monsters who have eyeballs in the palms of their hands and so on – here, at last, is a PG-rated stopgap.

In cinemas now and on Netflix from December 9

He’s a real boy: Pinocchio, voiced in this animation by Gregory Mann