Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (directed by del Toro and Mark Gustafson) is a new musical adaptation of Carlo Callodi’s famous folktale, rendered in lovingly detailed stop-motion. In this version Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) is a wood-carver who is broken by grief after the death of his young son. After falling into depression and possible alcoholism he frantically creates a roughly hewn wooden puppet – Pinocchio – to replace his lost son. They are then visited by a strange shimmering blue being known as the Wood Sprite (voiced by Tilda Swinton), who magically imbues Pinocchio with life, and charges the irate cricket Sebastian (voiced by Ewan McGregor), whose home was cut down to make Pinocchio, to help him be a good boy. Pinocchio then goes on a series of adventures which include becoming a star as a stringless puppet under the self-servingly nasty Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz), and being trained to become a kind of immortal soldier for the fascist Italian army.

Although del Toro and Gustafson’s film follows the basic story structure of the 1940 Disney classic, it is quite different in terms of style, tone, characterisation, setting, and many of the intrinsic details. As one would expect from del Toro, this new version of Pinocchio is a dark fairy-tale that does not shy away from difficult subject matter, and, as with the director’s earlier masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth, it is set against the backdrop of 1930s fascist Italy. Remarkably, however, it is also an easily digestible, rather moving, piece of family entertainment.

After a prologue that details the death of Geppetto’s son, we fast-forward to find the now older woodcarver embittered by grief. When he creates Pinocchio, it is in a drunken frenzy, a scene reminiscent of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). This is the nearest del Toro comes to presenting horror in his new film. When Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) is brought to life he is not immediately wide-eyed and adorable, instead, like most young children, he is curious, full of boundless energy, demanding, unsophisticated, and frankly a little obnoxious. Geppetto, troubled by guilt at having replaced his son, is frequently angry and impatient with his wooden boy. He calls him a burden, a word Pinocchio comes to understand too well. This dynamic forms the emotional arc of the film, as Geppetto learns to love and accept his new son.

The stop-motion animation is ornately beautiful, with each character a delicately carved and painted figurine brought to compelling life. This iteration of Pinocchio is raggedly constructed, with spiky, backwards sweeping hair made out of small broken branches, holes for eyes, and loosely jointed limbs. Without a lick of paint, he looks very much like an inanimate wooden object until brought to life. He is not cute in the traditional sense.  Geppetto, on the other hand, has a heavy, deeply lined brow, a patch of white hair that flops about, or sticks up, and a thickly curled white beard. He is the embodiment of goodness etched with pain. It is in the creature designs, however, that del Toro’s creative fingerprints are most evident. The Wood Sprite (the Blue Fairy more or less) is a strange, blue-glowing, insectoid creature, with lamp-like eyes, two sets of wings, and a fat tail. She is very definitely not of this world, and gives the impression of dabbling in human affairs almost on a whim. Her sister Death, who arguable plays a larger part in the film, is somewhere between a sphinx and Pan from Pan’s Labyrinth, with a cat-like body, and long curving horns covered in little blinking eyes. The giant whale caps it all however – a bulbous, pop-eyed monster of the sea that crashes in upon its prey with malicious fury.

Notably, this version of Pinocchio is very much a musical, although almost subliminally so. The songs by Alexandre Desplat, with lyrics co-written by del Toro, suffuse Pinocchio with an ethereal, magical quality, and unlike some musicals, are perfectly integrated into the fabric of the film. At no point does the action stop for a character to start singing. (There’s a running joke about this. Every time Sebastian, Pinocchio’s cricket conscience, tries to sing he gets squashed or knocked over.) In fact, some of the film’s most beguiling moments involve a character starting a song, only for that song to bind together a montage sequence that is essential to story and character development, while weaving a musical spell over the viewer.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a hauntingly beautiful film, that stands on its own as a distinct creation. It is charming, moving, and magical, with a lightly philosophical tone that does not back away from difficult subjects, and yet is perfectly approachable for a family audience. This is one to be cherished.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is now available on Netflix.

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