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Pinocchio (dir. Guillermo del Toro, 2022) — Review

Guillermo del Toro’s quirky stop-motion musical raises the classic question of any story about fascism: is this guy brave or stupid? Personal judgements will vary, but from a technical perspective, the Mexican director’s fusion of childhood chintziness with animated goose-stepping has history on its side.

For del Toro, the experience of the grotesque connects the mind of a rational adult to the magical belief of a child — he plays on the changing nature of self-deception with age. This philosophy is writ large in his international breakout, Pan’s Labyrinth, which offered us two versions of a young girl’s inconceivable experiences: the first in a supernatural underworld, the second in Franco’s Spain. . In 2022, in a very different political climate, del Toro has upped the ante by making what we might term ‘Quirky Fascism: The Musical.’

It may not be to everyone’s taste. But that’s the point. Pinocchio is a straight-up assault on one of the most popular, and illogical, arguments in society today: ‘won’t someone think of the children’? In this version of events, thinking of the children does not mean the postwar Disney consensus, i.e. bubble-wrapping the sanctity of innocent imagination. Rather, it means reverting to the age-old purpose of fairytales and scaring them straight.

Pan’s Labyrinth was a thoughtful horror which, despite its wee protagonist, broadcast its unsuitability for viewers in her age group with a banquet of nightmare-inducing promo shots. Pinocchio, on the other hand, nicks an array of stylistic stratagems from the classic animated fairytale genre to accomplish the key task of any memorable kid’s entertainment. It lulls the viewer with a generic soundtrack worthy of Peppa Pig and the lilting, CBeebies tones of Ewan McGregor, then — wham. Nightmare fuel.

In this version of the late-19th-century children’s story, from the mind of del Toro and co-screenwriter Patrick McHale, the kindly carpenter Geppetto (David Bradley) and his titular magical puppet (Gregory Mann) are reimagined just a few years later — the midst of World War I. After some opening shots of rural Italy that look like an Olive Garden commercial, introduced by magical cricket Ewan McGregor, and an eye-wateringly generic opening number by Geppetto’s cherubic 10-year-old son, the mood changes with the incursion of a bomber. Soon, both son and God are dead, with a rapid change of tone from ‘bootleg Pixar movie’ to ‘alcoholic dad screams at crucifix’.

In this brave new world, elements of the innocent resurface, only to be warped by change. Geppetto’s son is brought back to life as a puppet, Pinocchio, by the ‘blue fairy’ of the original — reimagined here as a pair of glowing, sphynx-like terrors, voiced by (who else) Tilda Swinton, who owe more to the Greek Fates than to the friendly forest bimbo of the original Italian story. Upon discovering that he cannot die, the disobedient Pinocchio is pressed into service first as an entertainer, and then as a trainee super-soldier in Mussolini’s army.

Del Toro’s ungodly mass of opposing forces — authority and freedom, age and youth, magic and science, and far far more — may seem odd to some. But, appropriately for a blatantly Catholic filmmaker turned “raging atheist”, this weird little take on the fairytale for the 2020s owes much to the political satire consolidated in the Habsburg Empire. (Bear with me here.) Forcing together the highs and lows of the human experience in anarchic fashion, and resolving them by offering the audience the choice to believe in a miracle, Pinocchio offers a riotous, considered nod not only to the fairytale tradition, but the role of ‘low culture’ in checking authority.