guillermo del toro's pinocchio (guillermo del toro and mark gustafson, 2022)

This is my 10th Guillermo del Toro movie, and there hasn't been a stinker among them (well, I didn't get Hellboy when I saw it, but by the time of Hellboy II, I was locked into del Toro ... I imagine if I saw the first one again, I'd like it more now). He has at least one all-time classic, Pan's Labyrinth, and one close-to-classic that I'm about to reevaluate (The Shape of Water). He's made top-notch noir (Nightmare Alley) and top-notch Kaiju (Pacific Rim). His Gothic romance was a good one (Crimson Peak). He's even good at television ... The Strain lasted for four seasons. So there shouldn't be any surprise that when he turned to stop-motion animation, the result would be a wonder to behold.

My memories of the Disney Pinocchio are vague enough that comparisons aren't much use. I've never read the book, so I'll just take people's word for it that del Toro and co-writer Patrick McHale came closer to book than to Disney. Having said that, there are obvious changes from the book as well, most notably that this time, the action takes place in Italy under Mussolini (the book was written in the 19th century). Del Toro often manages to work Fascism into his stories, and this time, he lets Pinocchio have an enjoyable moment as Mussolini watches:

The animation is uncanny in that you forget it's stop-motion almost immediately. It has a look of its own ... this is not a Pixar movie, or something from the classic Disney period. The uncanny feeling comes from the painstaking detail the animators put into the project; it appears seamless, although we know that can't be the case.

Del Toro and McHale offer some interesting takes. Pinocchio doesn't want to be a real boy this time. He just wants to be accepted for who he is. Geppetto, the wood carver who creates Pinocchio, wants him to replace his dead son, but Pinocchio is incorrigible, and eventually Geppetto learns to love the wooden puppet on his own merits.

There are some excellent choices for the voice actors ... I often wish people who work as voice actors would take precedence over star casting, but the stars certainly work here. There are Oscar winners (Cate Blanchett, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton), Emmy winners (Ewan McGregor, John Turturro), young Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, and Ron Perlman, who has now been in eight del Toro movies ... he was even in del Toro's first feature, the Spanish-language Cronos, even though Perlman doesn't speak Spanish. Finally, David Bradley is perfect as Geppetto, and he, too, is a semi-regular for del Toro (he played a main character in The Strain).

With all of this, you might wonder if del Toro has come up with another classic. For me, Pinocchio is a near-miss. Good as it is, it suffers from the bane of modern animated features: it's a musical. The songs aren't as obnoxious as usual, here, but I wouldn't have missed them if they were gone.