The first images of the film, presented at the Annecy Festival were promising. However, nothing prepared for the telluric shock of the Pinocchio by Guillermo Del Toro, co-directed by Mark Gustafson and screened at the Lumière Festival in front of an enthusiastic audience before being available on Netflix this Friday. The director of Nightmare Alley and The Shape of Water revisits the story of the puppet in its own way in a sublime animated film.
“I always wondered why Pinocchio wanted to become a real little boy when, for my part, I found him more endearing as a puppet, he confided to 20 minutes in Annecy. It is this theme that I want to explore in my film. ” His Pinocchio in stop-motion is very different from previous versions
Not really nice
The puppet as conceived by the artist Georgina Hayns does not have the round and cute side of that of the animated film released in 1940 from Disney studios. It is closer to the tale of Carlo Collodi (1826-1890) by the unsympathetic side of the character. Similarly Jiminy, the crisp cricket has much less importance in this new opus (but it is very successful all the same).
dark as ever
Guillermo Del Toro situates his action in Mussolini’s Italy where, and we quickly understand, we didn’t laugh every day. This particularly dark political subtext is more reminiscent of the Pan’s Labyrinth or at The Devil’s Backbonethe filmmaker’s previous films than to the marshmallow-scented feature films of Roberto Benigni (2002) or by Robert Zemeckis with Tom Hanks (2022).
Not really for small children
Whether Luigi Comencini in 1972 and Matteo Garrone in 2019 tinged the harshness of the world of Pinocchio with fairy tale poetry, the story reviewed and corrected by Guillermo Del Toro is nothing short of a bluette for toddlers. The tone is set from the death of Gepetto’s son in the bombing of a church, while the Fascists turn out to be much more frightening than if they came from a fantasy world.
We are entitled to prefer more tender adaptations or more faithful to the original work than this Pinocchio where the style of Guillermo Del Toro emerges. But this rereading is stamped with the seal of a great creator who manages to make people laugh, tremble and cry bitterly by delivering a sublime political fable denouncing stupidity and totalitarianism which is also an ode to life. Hats off.