Guillermo Del Toro’s ‘Pinocchio’
In this new animated adaptation, Guillermo Del Toro takes the much-loved episodic tale for children and fashions a more coherent narrative with a deeper emotional anchor. He makes the story his own, bringing to the fore his perennial themes of death and loss, the Underworld, and the shadow of fascism. The film is a triumph: an exquisitely realised labour of love, with exceptional design, lighting, and mise en scene.
And yet it didn’t work for me. I didn’t go along with it. I would like to reflect on why that might have happened.
What Went Right Is What Went Wrong
It could be the old problem of holding onto the original, getting abstracted by points of divergence. But these divergences were not trivial. Del Toro and screenwriters Patrick McHale and Matthew Robbins, alter the beginning of the story, adding a lengthy flashback, and then commit to that new trajectory, picking up existing episodes and characters accordingly, supplying new ones when required.
I have to applaud their work—the use of Pinocchio’s famous growing nose, for example, was ingenious and the talking cricket’s character arc provided an elegant solution to the matter of transformation. In a literary sense, they have improved on the original, which I’d describe as clunky and uneven. But in the process I think they lost the spirit, the innocent primal exuberance that animated Collodi’s orginal text.
The ‘Spirit’ of the Original
Pinocchio is a force of nature, a life force. His spirit literally animates a block of wood. The block protests at the threat of being chopped up for the fire which so spooks its owner he passes it on to his neighbour, a poor woodcarver who needs material for has begged material for his next project. The presence of this life force is arbitrary, unmotivated, unexplained. When the woodcarver works on the block of wood, articulating the limbs, carving its visage, he gives the spirit the ability to act in the world, but the first thing it does is laugh in the old man’s face and steal his hairpiece.
The story that follows concerns the process of learning to control and direct this energy, to find a place in the culture, or the community. Some argue that it is an allegory of an individual’s journey to maturity; it is certainly a push and pull of duty and desire, which culminates like so many stories in an act of selflessness. Del Toro’s narrative has a similarly strategic climax, but a different message.
But the fun of the character is to be found not in the lesson or message but the trouble he causes and the scrapes he gets into: to put it simply, the original is more fun, more anarchic, while Del Toro’s emphasis on the death shifts the centre of gravity from the spirit of the boy to the woodcarver’s sense of grief and loss and an adopted child’s wish to be fully-accepted.
Perhaps it all went wrong when the puppet/boy began to sing his predecessor’s mother’s song. Besides being more musical theatre pastiche than folk lullaby, the song was out of character, or presented a very different, sweeter character than the one I expected. The film lost me there and never really won me back.
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