Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Like J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Carlo Collodi’s children's fantasy novel Pinocchio is a tale that has been adapted for the screen so many times I've grown pretty tired of it. This year we get not one but two big-screen Pinocchios, a Robert Zemeckis "live-action" remake of the classic 1940 Disney animated version (still the best screen version of the story and one of Walt Disney's greatest achievements) and this stop-motion animated film co-directed by Guillermo del Toro. The latter movie has been a passion project for the Oscar-winning Mexican genre filmmaker for his entire life, and it's too bad that after the long production journey required to realize his version of the story it has to compete with another Disney version. Yes, people really do still watch those corporate bastardisations of the great Disney animated classics. I have stopped going to them, so I shant be seeing Tom Hanks trying desperately to provide enthusiasm for two while acting with a CGI character (except in the embarrassing clips I've seen). Anyway, nothing could get me to watch another Zemeckis CGI fest.

The del Toro version of the story, however, has much to recommend it. Stop-motion veteran Mark Gustafson creates the dazzling animation, Gris Grimly provides the character design, and del Toro supplies the dark but whimsical tone. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is set in Mussolini’s Italy right before WWII. This is the first version of the too-oft-told-tail I’ve seen in which the title character is fashioned during a drunken night of grief rage. There’s not only a magical fairy, or Wood Sprite in this case, who brings the puppet protagonist to life; there's also a dark fairy, literally Death, who presides over the underworld and teaches Pinocchio the difference between death for mortals and death for a wooden creature like himself. Both the Wood Sprite and Death are voiced by Tilda Swinton (the characters are sisters) and it's no surprise for a del Toro picture that Death is the most interesting character. Like the Pale Man in the director's much-lauded, but rather dull, Pan's Labyrinth, Death may not get a whole lot of screen time but they're what we remember about the movie. I spent most of this picture wishing Pinocchio (played with maximum obnoxiousness by Gregory Mann) would just keep dying so I could be ported off with him back to limbo where he gets to hang out with this cool Chimera, as well as some comical undertaker rabbits (all voiced by Tim Blake Nelson).

No matter how often and how cleverly it's told, Pinocchio can be a hard story to adapt to feature length because the protagonist is almost always played as either a passive, wide-eyed naive or an unruly and clueless 8-year-old. This film leans deep into the latter, as the undisciplined aspects of a character excited about every new discovery are part of what appeals to the filmmaker about this story. But the boisterous puppet wears out his welcome very quickly for me—I'd be one of the shitty townspeople who don't want him disturbing my church service.

Likewise, the cricket character, voiced here by Ewan McGregor, is almost always presented as a scolding stick in the mud. This movie's Sebastian the Cricket, who also narrates, becomes a tedious bore before Pinocchio has even left home. Some of the other characters are fun like Spazzatura, the mistreated monkey assistant of the evil puppet master, con artist, and ringmaster Count Volpe. Spazzatura has a cool, expressive design and speaks mostly in grunts provided by Cate Blanchett. But this is one of those movies plagued with the British accent issue. I know this is a hang-up for me and no one else, but it just doesn't make sense when a story is intentionally set in a specific time and place to have all the characters speak with contemporary dialect and accents inappropriate for the setting. It's fitting for the characters who are travellers, like the cricket, Death, and Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), but why is Geppetto British? Why is the sinister official of the Italian government voiced by the distinctly American Ron Perlman?

While it's an interesting idea to set this tale in fascist Italy, del Tore and his co-writers don't connect the setting with the story’s themes. In the end, it's just a backdrop. And it's hard to buy into all the Italian and Catholic iconography when half the characters sound like they’re in Merry Old England. The songs in this movie are also pretty terrible. The filmmakers seem to know this, as they keep the musical numbers mercifully short, but why does this have to be a musical at all? Nick Cave was originally attached to compose the score, but he was replaced by Alexandre Desplat. The songs, by Desplat and lyricist Roeban Katz, are about on par with a 1980s animated TV movie and reduce the film's appeal even further. There's a lot to admire about the craftsmanship of this picture, but it's also kind of a slog.

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