No warm candlelight shines in Master Gepetto’s workshop, it’s not in a sleepy Italian town like Disney’s, but on a hill outside at the edge of the forest. A child’s grave, from which a pine tree grows, is in front of it. Every day the old man cries here. One night he goes out with the ax, drunk and angry at the fate that took his son from him, to fell the cursed tree. He drags the wood into the house and carves a marionette doll with rough cuts, empties the bottle. Then he falls over, falling asleep on the spot and snoring while the ghosts of the forest crawl into the wood.
“Guillermo del Toros Pinocchio” is the name of the film, which retells the story of the talking puppet Pinocchio – because of the clearly legible handwriting of its author. It’s an animated film featuring hilariously chattering sidekick characters like the cricket Sebastian J. Cricket, with singing routines and a cartoonish villain shouting “I control you!” calls – a children’s film, at least in part. Despite the graves, the anger, the desperation that is at the beginning of the plot. The irritation about this does not dissipate while watching, rather it deepens into a film experience that incidentally raises interesting questions: about the relationship between childhood and fairy tales to horror, adult fairy tales to children’s fairy tales – ultimately childhood to the wooden skeleton of adult wisdom, the year of life for Year of life grows closer to her, until the lump in her chest gets heavy and one drags oneself to the cinema to finally be able to cry and laugh again.
But we’re anticipating – maybe because “Pinocchio” feels like a lot has happened before. For example, del Toro’s very, very big film “Pan’s Labyrinth” from 2006. During the horrors at the end of World War II, an eleven-year-old girl discovers a fairy-tale world in which her father, the king, awaits her as a missing princess in order to break a curse , which has infested his magical realm. Both worlds, the fantastic and the real, mix, the fairy tale with its child-eating monsters offers no refuge from reality, but trials to be overcome. Unbelievable sadness, unbelievable happiness when the girl ends up lying on the forest floor with a bullet in her stomach, while at the same time stepping before her royal father and the cheering fairytale folk. It is only in the light of the Transfiguration that it becomes possible to pass the trials, to face the intolerable profanity of violence, to resist it – death, fascism. Such is the deeply humanistic hope that runs through all of del Toro’s films.
Pinocchio might be the perfect soldier – so send him to war
“Pinocchio” sharpens this idea further. “Pan’s Labyrinth” had a real film level around a partially animated fairytale world, but here there are only the animations created in the stop-motion process. The tension between life and death, the worlds of adults and children, is now an internal matter of the fairy tale. You understand that after just a few minutes, when a humming sounds and fighter planes appear in the sky of the child-friendly, cheerful world that Gepetto and his son Carlo share. Once again we are in the era of World War II, again among fascists, this time Italian ones. One of the bombs dropped by these planes takes Carlo’s life.
Pinocchio first enters Gepetto’s life as a tormentor who, laughing, spreads chaos in the workshop. He wants to touch everything. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” he says excitedly over and over again. Gepetto quickly realizes that this is not an evil force – it is the bubbling life that otherwise happily haunts the world of adults in the form of children.
Death is soon allowed to express itself, too, as Pinocchio dies several times and then, past a group of bunnies with blue glowing eyes playing cards, steps in front of the divine sister of the spirit that gave him life. She is a benevolent force, just as death in myth is always the stern ally of the living. Her face, a mask with a long side horn, looks like Pan’s in “Pan’s Labyrinth”.
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Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio had to become “real” by resisting the temptations of the theatre, i.e. fiction, and abstaining from childish debauchery (which “makes an ass of him”) – a message so drab and childish that it heart stops. In the case of del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson, fiction offers no salvation either, but prepares for salvation. Pinocchio, who always returns to earth when he dies, is supposed to go to war for the fascists. After all, he would be the perfect soldier.
He is put in a training camp with other children who all want to become brave fascists. The little ones are divided into two groups, given guns with paintballs in their hands, then they whiz off into the practice trenches like a playground. Yellow and red paint soon spurts out of the muzzles onto their faces. Humans are crueler than death – but del Toro shows that in doubly fantastical rapture: as a child’s play in an animated film with musical elements, a bottomless fairy tale. Only the greatest storytellers have so much respect for the world of children, not to spare them from it and yet spare them the profanity of war, so much respect for life, to show the senseless play with it in this way.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, USA, Mexico, France 2022 – Director: Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson. Book: Guillermo del Toro, Patrick McHale. Music: Alexandre Desplat. Original Voices: Gregory Mann, David Bradley, Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton. Netflix, 114 minutes. Theatrical release: 24.11.2022. Streaming start: 9.12.2022.