MOVIE REVIEW – An old man, overcome by grief and booze, splits a log in his workshop. It is night and a storm is raging outside. As the man chisels and saws, lightning flashes illuminate him. Gradually, the shadow of a boy looms on the table. Clocks chime, thunder rumbles in the darkness, and a bystander proclaims, “This is a house of horrors!”. The Guillermo del Toro: Pinocchio Netflix film is characterized by wild flashes of ingenuity, all born of meticulous craftsmanship and dedication.

Indeed, this is 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, who desperately carves out his grief sitting on a bench. The scene, however, is tuned to the same heartbreaking frequency as in James Whale’s Frankenstein, in which the monster shakes himself. In both scenes, the mania of the creator comes through, both are filled with the will to defy the natural order, and both are underlaid with an intangible sadness.

Pinocchio Dark

The darkness that del Toro is used to dealing with – and which is too often sanded down and polished from other productions of the Pinocchio tale, most notably Disney’s – is here infused with a piercing power to fill the narrative. Thus, the Wood Elf (Tilda Swinton), takes pity on Geppetto and blesses the doll he has made with an anima. With her quartet of feathered wings, each adorned with jeweled eyes, she resembles the Angel of Death played by del Toro’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army’s Doug Jones, and is quite creepy.

When he touches the block, his spell appears as a glowing blue ooze that flows down the wood grain. It’s a beautiful moment, partly because it’s also so perverse; we know that the old man’s misery can’t be fixed, especially not by something so strange and disturbing, but we want the magic to work, if only to bring him back from his miserable slump for a while. As the wooden creature creaks and snaps into motion, the result is a real Frankenstein moment. It’s alive!

Well-directed, focused plot

The plot of the film is broken up into episodic pieces. Firstly, Pinocchio (Gregory Mann), recently cut down from a tree, wonders about his rootless place in the world. He tries to make his creator proud by obeying and attending the local school. But it is not long before he branches out. On the way to her first lesson, she is seduced by Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), the leader of a traveling carnival, who strings her up and lures her on stage to perform for an audience of boisterous children. What’s most striking here is that despite the narrative twists and turns, the film doesn’t feel unfocused as it rewards your rapt attention.

Volpe is accompanied by a puppet monkey (voiced, or rather, screeched, by Cate Blanchett), Spazzaturra. The word is Italian for ‘trash’, which suggests the creature’s place in the Count’s esteem. But it also carries echoes of another word: sprezzatura, which has no exact translation, but refers to a learned carelessness – a careful concealment of art to make it seem natural, effortless. There could not be a more apt description of the power of this strange film, in whose intricate chambers the obsessions that have accompanied del Toro throughout his career have gathered.

Mussolini’s Italian fascist world of order in a riot of disorder

As in Pan’s Labyrinth, the plot is set in fascist-era Spain in 1944, as Franco combs the countryside for rebels. In this film, Pinocchio wanders around Mussolini’s Italy. Fascism is once again the perfect foil for del Toro’s designs; his quest for purity and order clashes with the richly polluted tangles of myth. On one occasion, the local Podestà (Ron Perlman) turns up at Gepetto’s house, concerned about the old man’s new creation. Dressed like a Jean-Pierre Melville character – hat, tie, trench coat, perfectly trimmed moustache – he invites the assembled company to admire the immaculate straightness of his son’s teeth.

Compare the vision of strict order with the immaculate warmth of Pinocchio. He’s chubby, with a crooked grin and a crack running down his chest. And more mess ensues. His trademark, the bridge of his nose, amplified by a lie, is an almighty mess. Gone is the smooth, glistening nasal protrusion of Disney cartoons; in its place are sudden, bulging, gnarled branches, as if dishonesty could burst from it in a sneeze. If del Toro is a master of monsters, it is partly because he looks at their aberrations – the fangs, the claws, the crooked horns – with a compassionate eye, and presents them as projections of human frailty.

I needed the unique style

This is important because the Pinocchio story, frankly, needed these extravagant stylistic elements. His desire to be a real little boy always struck me as cheesy, and besides, the advantages of his condition were plentiful: no physical pain, fully replaceable limbs, and – apart perhaps from the gradual deterioration of time – he never dies. His physical form may be a little lame, but these advantages compensate for that. So it’s a pleasure to see del Toro, along with co-director Mark Gustafson, exploring the possibilities of the tale. When Pinocchio is destroyed, he is transported by an entourage of rabbits to the realm of woodpeckers and hourglasses. After a period of stagnation, he can return to the waking world. This is great news for the Podestà, who thinks he has glimpsed the perfect, infinitely rebuildable soldier and wants to enlist the immortal boy in the army.

To be fair, this late, fascist training camp section of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a bit of a drag, with the previously well-built tension steadily dwindling. By the time Pinocchio, Gepetto and a certain Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor) are finally swallowed by a cetacean, the story has settled down considerably.

del Toro created his own Pinocchio

Nevertheless, del Toro has forged a truly unique and distinctive style of filmmaking. What stays with you days later is this originality, this unique del Toro universe, all worked out again with meticulous skill and dedication.

It is important to note that this is no longer a classic children’s story. It will be hard to escape, for example, the image of Gepetto’s human son in the church, moments before his fiery death, gazing in panic at the wooden statue of Christ crucified. Or of Pinocchio falling into the sea, flailing his limbs to save his drowning father. Del Toro hasn’t merely stitched and twisted his unique style onto familiar literary material. Instead, he saw its promise and began to shape it to create his own unique Pinocchio.

-BadSector-