Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (Dir Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson, 1h 57m, 2022)

A new year dawns, and what better way to mark the change than to look back at four of the best films of last year, beginning with one of 2022's oddest trends-adaptions of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio. Yes, for some reason last year, we got three of them-yet another of Disney's woeful remakes, featuring an extremely unnerving CGI version of the puppet, which not even Tom Hanks (Geppetto) could save, an absolutely bizarre attempt to reboot the career of no less than Pauly Shore in an audio-visual car-crash re-dub of a bad Russian animated film, and, thank god, today's subject, Guillermo Del Toro's long-gestating, passion-project stop-start animation adaption, which finally released into cinemas for a limited run, before arriving on Netflix shortly before Christmas.

That this film is here is nothing short of a miracle. That it may be Del Toro's best film since Pan's Labyrinth is unquestionable. Yet, in this familiar tale of a wooden puppet boy coming to life, Del Toro finds new depths and new highs, from the rise of Italian fascism, and the cruelty and pain of loss, to the wonders of being alive, and of humanity. Marrying this with one of the most beautiful, painstaking, and spectacular mediums of animation, in the form of stop-start, a spectacular voice cast, excellent songs, and a striking, and original take on the familiar story, so Del Toro has created yet another timeless fable.

In a certain sense, though, Del Toro has always taken influence from the tale; certainly, the 1940 Disney adaption has haunted Del Toro, and indeed cinema for decades-alongside Bambi (1942), it is the studio under Walt at its most impressionist, certainly at its most technically groundbreaking, and at least in terms of Pinocchio, the darkest and most intense the studio would be for decades. Seeing the film in 60s Mexico, a young Del Toro was impressed, its fairy tale of a beautiful, imperfect boy made of wood a perfect poetic encapsulation of almost everything the director's films focus upon. Ever as a young film-maker, his mind was made up. Guillermo Del Toro decided to make his own adaption of Pinocchio.

Enter, thus, children's illustrator Gris Grimly, whose 2002 illustrated version of the book cast the young wooden scamp not as the charmingly realistic puppet of the Disney film, nor as the Pagliacci-esque ruffed boy of the original illustrations, but as a rougher hewn, spindly, and yet, irrepressibly alive figure. Del Toro, coming across the designs, and with his own perspective of the puppet boy as unruly, but ultimately good-hearted, against a more sombre world of Fascist Italy, less populated by the magical creatures of the tale, and more by cruel, greedy, and indeed war-like forces, realises he's found his setting, his visual style, and most of all his Pinocchio. At long last, Del Toro's passion project is about to be carved out, to emerge blinking into the world, his long-time collaborator Matthew Robbins co-writing the script, the duo taking influence from Frankenstein's similarities to the narrative, and with a gothic, yet family-focused feel of intergenerational love and compassion at its centre.

There's just one problem-despite taking Grimly on as concept artist, despite a voice cast that could have included Daniel Radcliffe, John Hurt, Tom Waits and Christopher Walken, despite Nick Cave being attached as lyricist, and despite Mark Gustafson, an animation stalwart who's been in the industry for decades, (including co-directing Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)), and despite this being Guillermo Del Toro...nobody is interested. The film languishes in development hell, before, in 2017, seeming to simply fade away, Del Toro unable to raise enough for its $35 million budget via traditional means. Del Toro's Pinocchio would never be a real film. This, of course, is where Netflix step in, and why, at long last we are able to talk about this film.

Del Toro's take on Pinocchio is a film of loss, of darkness, and of life. We begin with loss, and with Geppetto (David Bradley), a far more cantankerous, troubled incarnation of the kindly wood carver than the typical film-goer is used to, and for good reason. An extended flashback, narrated by Sebastian J Cricket, (Ewan McGregor), a would-be author and raconteur, who later becomes Pinocchio's would-be conscience, reveals the loss of Geppetto's beloved son, Carlo, in a bombing raid in the First World War, with Geppetto planting a pine cone at his son's grave. In a stunning moment of animation that is just one of countless beautifully evocative sequences throughout the film, twenty years of life pass in a few seconds, the pine tree growing over the lonely figure of Geppetto, perfectly symbolising his grief and loss.

It is at this point, as Sebastian pompously proclaims, that he enters the story-but no sooner has he taken up residence to write his memoirs, than Geppetto's grief overcomes him, and, turning to the bottle, hacks down and begins to carve the tree in what seems, at first, a vain attempt to make a new son-there is at once hints of Frankenstein, of an unnatural sense to this act of creation, and a certain sympathy, a certain bathetic quality to a sad, old, drunk man trying desperately to bring back the son war has taken from him. It is a sadness the spirits, as Sebastian recounts, take pity on. Geppetto. Sebastian, and the lifeless wooden boy are visited by a wood spirit (Tilda Swinton)-a multi-armed and horned creature of iridescent blue, and one of the most spectacular puppets in a film filled with spectacular puppets, who grants the wooden boy life, and entrusts him to Sebastian's care.

What follows, as the puppet boy awakes, is a sweetly done narrative arc of coming-of-age-Pinocchio practically bursts into life, Gregory Mann (who also voices Carlo), giving him at once a charm and an endless curiosity, his first song matched with some superbly lively animation. Geppetto, however, is terrified by this spindly wooden creature that chirpily calls him father, and bombards him (through song!) about the world around him, and soon locks him in a cupboard, only for the boy to escape and follow him to church, where the god-fearing congregation threaten to turn on him. However, despite the attempts of the local Podesta (Ron Perlman), and his father, to ensure he attends school, so Pinocchio is led astray by the positively devilish figure of Count Volpe (Christopher Waltz), and his monkey aide (Spazzatura, voiced by Cate Blanchett), who, by ensnaring the boy in a contract to appear in his show, begin to reveal the true darkness to Del Toro's incarnation of the tale-that Pinocchio, the puppet (in, indeed a film of puppeterred stop-start marionettes), is the only truly free creature.

This sense of those around him being little more than puppets, especially in the face of the Machiavellian Volpe, and the insidious and seemingly omnipresent figure of Mussolini, and the rise of Italian fascism, pervades the second third of the film, but it is, as he begins to realise the threat of the world around him, that Pinocchio meets his death, run over as his father and Volpe tussle over him, and it is here that the film's most visually striking setting, the afterlife, makes itself known, brought to life by Mexican animation studio, El Taller de Chucho in luscious blues and blacks, populated by the Donnie Darko-esque Black Rabbits (all voiced by Tim Blake Nelson), and reigned over by Death (Tilda Swinton again), a sphinx-like figure, and the film's other spectacular, and otherworldly puppet, who advises the young boy that he cannot truly die, only spend time in her domain whilst an hourglass counts out time between his "deaths"-even this most powerful of creatures is beholden to rules, and the later payoff between the free spirit and the curious companion is a pitch perfect moment in the finale.

Waking from death, so Pinocchio resolves to join Volpe, both to protect his father from Volpe's wrath, despite the circus-owner's growing cruelty towards the hapless and Spazzatura, and, with the dawning realisation that the Podesta, and the Fascists, would conscript him otherwise-this, however, leaves Geppetto, left behind, heartbroken, with only Sebastian for company, the two of them eventually vowing to follow the boy, only to find themselves always a step or two behind, and, in trying to track him down as Volpe and his troupe cross and re-cross Italy, so they are swallowed by the horrifying and spectacular Dogfish, a colossal model that looms over the scene. Pinocchio, none-the-wiser to his father's fate, begins to realise the darker side of his seemingly idyllic lifestyle; that he is being overworked, that his co-star, who can only communicate using his puppets, is being abused by Volpe, and the Volpe has been withholding money from his beloved father.

This comes to the fore with two sequences, both stabbing deep into the heart of the darkness at the heart of 1930s Italy. The first, in which Il Duce (nicknamed Il Dolche by Pinocchio throughout the film), actually appears, is a complete tear-down of fascism on a scale only matched in Del Toro's filmography by Pan's Labyrinth. Mussolini (Tom Kenny, the only actor to appear in all three 2022 Pinocchio adaptions, and better known to millions as the voice of Spongebob Squarepants) is a risible figure, ever-present via posters but revealled in person to be a tiny, preposterous man who, in a childlike voice declaims he is looking forward to seeing the puppets. However, what starts as a triumph for Volpe-himself, like his fellow Italians, caught up in the cult of personality that surrounds the fascist dictator, has become nothing but one of millions of puppets controlled by the state-turns to utter humiliation as the puckish Pinocchio lampoons the leader to his face.

The puppet boy is promptly shot, waking up in the back of a lorry full of boys on their way to training, whilst Volpe is ruined, resurfacing in the finale to wreak his revenge, and once again, Del Toro perfectly skewers the entire ideology of the Italian Fascists-we see the Podesta utterly enraptured by the idea of an eternal and undying fascist, made of sturdy Italian pine, but, as he befriends the Podesta's son, Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard), so he begins to help others break their strings, helping Candlewick stand up to his father during a set of wargames that are utterly undermined by the duo simply enjoying being children in the face of oncoming war. For Pinocchio is a creature of independence, and despite his setbacks, despite his multiple deaths, despite his disobedience, Pinocchio is a creature of life, and of joy, something the film's denouement captures perfectly, as Pinocchio searches for his father, willing to pay the ultimate price, and true freedom, to save him.

Pinocchio is a staggering accomplishment, not just because every single shot of this film brims with life, not merely because the perfect miniature worlds that its perfectly imperfect marionettes populate are spectacular and beautiful and bizarre in their pitch perfect recreation of 1930s Italy. No, there's more to this film than its raw beauty, and emotional frankness, its timeless songs, its charming characters, and the fantastic voice cast that play them. Pinocchio feels like a watershed moment for Del Toro-he has, after all been working on this film for fourteen years, and, whisper it, Pinocchio may well be his very best since Pan's Labyrinth Del Toro has so often created modern fairy tales for cinema-goers young and old that, to be allowed to work on his dream project, to return, in a way, to that version of Pinocchio that he's practically dreamed of making since he was a young man feels every bit as satisfying as the denouement of its wooden hero.

Every second of this film is frameable, so many sequences wordlessly magnificent in visual shorthand. Every performance practically disappears behind the puppet each actor or actress voices, all of it is so exquisitely beautiful that, in some ways it feels as definitive a version of the film for stop-start as Walt Disney's did, eight decades ago, for hand-drawn animation. That we grow to love the wooden boy is inevitable, that we feel for him as the strange gorky outcast that still embraces life is Del Toro's magic, that we follow his story whilst Del Toro packs it with such a damning critique of war and fascism, and brims it with a story about a boy realising he will never be able to become the son he was made to replace for a grieving father, but that he is so much more than this, is Guillermo Del Toro's genius.

In a year packed with takes on the classic fairytale, Del Toro's version doesn't just feel like the best, it feels like the definitive version of the tale for decades to come, a beautiful, perfectly formed and emotionally resonant rendition, as only this master craftsman of the fairytale can make them.

 Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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