An old man, felled by grief and soused in booze, hacks at a log in his workshop. It’s night and a storm has grown heavy outside. As the man chisels and saws, he’s illuminated by lightning. Gradually, the shadow of a boy takes shape on the table. The clocks chime, claps of thunder rumble through the dark, and an onlooker proclaims, “It’s a house of horrors!”
Indeed, such is the coup of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, a stop-motion adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. The old man is in fact the kindly Geppetto (David Bradley), devastated by the loss of his son and desperate to carve out his sorrow at the bench. But the scene is tuned to the same crackling frequency as the one in James Whale’s Frankenstein, in which the monster is jolted into being. Both scenes hum with mania, both are charged with the will to defy the natural order, and both belie an elusive sadness.
The darkness in which del Toro customarily deals—and which is all too often planed and polished from other productions of the tale, most notably those of Disney—infests the narrative with a welcome fecundity. Hence the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) who takes pity on Geppetto and blesses the doll that he’s made with anima. With her quartet of feathered wings, each jeweled with eyes, she’s a dead ringer for Doug Jones’s Angel of Death from del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and scarcely a blink away from the macabre.
When she touches the block, her spell manifests as a luminous blue secretion, which bleeds along the wood grain. It’s a wonderful moment, partly because its wonders are so perverse; you know that the old man’s misery can’t be fixed, especially by something so freakish and disturbing, but you want the magic to take effect, if only to stun him out of his misery for a time. The result, as the lad creaks and clatters into motion, is a kind of excited wrongness. It’s alive!
The film’s plot is parceled into episodic chunks. First, having only recently been chopped from a tree, Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) is curious about his rootless place in the world. He tries to make his creator proud, by being obedient and attending the local school. But it isn’t long before he branches out. On the way to his first lesson, he’s tempted away by Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), the leader of a traveling carnival, who trusses him up in strings and trots him out on stage, to perform for an audience of frenzied children. What’s most notable here is that, despite the narrative swerves, the film doesn’t feel unfocused, as it repays your close attention.
Note Count Volpe’s snout, as long and sharp as a knife, honed by years of mendacity. Also in Volpe’s company is a puppeteering monkey (voiced, or rather squawked, by Cate Blanchett) named Spazzaturra. The word is Italian for “garbage,” which clues us in to the creature’s place in the Count’s esteem. But it also carries the echo of another word: sprezzatura, for which there’s no exact translation but which refers to a studied nonchalance—the careful concealment of one’s art so as to appear natural, effortless. There’s no more fitting a description of the powers of this strange film, in whose intricate chambers del Toro’s career-long obsessions have gathered.
As in Pan’s Labyrinth, we’re planted in fascist soil. That film, an exquisite portrayal of fantasy as a key that may crack the code of our woes, is set in Spain in 1944, with Franco combing the countryside for rebels. This one has Pinocchio clambering across Mussolini’s Italy. Once again, fascism is the perfect foil for del Toro’s designs; in its craving for cleanliness and order, it clashes with the richly soiled tangle of his myths. At one point, the local Podestà (Ron Perlman) shows up at Gepetto’s house, concerned about the old man’s new creation. He’s dressed like a figure from Jean-Pierre Melville—hat, tie, trench coat, perfectly pruned moustache—and he invites the assembled company to admire the immaculate straightness of his son’s teeth.
Compare that vision of stark order with the maculate warmth of Pinocchio. He has a pumpkin head, a crooked grin, and a crack running down his chest. And there’s yet more disorder to come. His trademark feature, the lie-boosted lengthening of his nose, causes an almighty mess. The smooth, sparkling elongation of the Disney cartoon is gone; in its place a sudden burst of gnarled boughs, as if dishonesty could force its way out like a sneeze. If del Toro is a master of monsters, it’s in part because he inspects their aberrations—the fangs, the claws, the curled horns—with a sympathetic eye, and presents them as outcrops of human frailty.
All of which matters because the story of Pinocchio, frankly, was in need of extra stakes. His urge to be a real boy always felt sappy, and, besides, the advantages of his condition were plentiful: no bodily pains, fully replaceable limbs, and, perhaps aside from the gradual whittling of time, no death. His physical form may be a little crummy, but his bark is worse than his plight. It’s gratifying, then, to see del Toro, along with co-director Mark Gustafson, feel out the possibilities of the fable. When Pinocchio does perish, he’s spirited, by a procession of rabbits, to a realm of wooden coffins and hourglasses. After a period of stasis, he’s permitted to return to the waking world. This is great news for the Podestà, who thinks he espies the perfect soldier, endlessly rebootable, and seeks to draft the deathless boy into the army.
In truth, this late passage of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, spent in a fascist training camp, does drag a little. An air of the procedural seeps in, and as the film pays its respects to the beats of Collodi’s book, the tension leaks out. When Pinocchio, Gepetto, and one Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor) swallowed by a Dogfish, you’re hardly holding your breath.
Nonetheless, del Toro has forged a striking film. What stays with you, days later, is its wild flashes of invention, all born of painstaking craft and devotion. Try and shake the image of Gepetto’s human son in a church, moments before his fiery demise, glancing in panic at a wooden statue of Christ on the cross. Or of Pinocchio plunging into the sea and thrashing his limbs, the better to rescue his drowning father. Del Toro hasn’t stitched and bolted his singular style onto familiar material. Rather, he’s seen the promise that it has always harbored, and started to sculpt. Hence the sight of Gepetto grappling with Volpe over the boy and crying, “I made him!” Back comes the reply, no less potent: “I discovered him!”
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
