117 min | PG | November 9, 2022 | Netflix
Geppetto carves a wooden boy out of grief and gets one who refuses to die. Guillermo del Toro drops the fairy tale into Mussolini’s Italy and asks what obedience costs. The strings are the point.
A grieving carpenter loses his son in a wartime bombing. Years later, drunk and broken, he carves a boy out of pine. The boy wakes up. Guillermo del Toro sets this version of Pinocchio in Mussolini’s Italy and turns the story into an argument about obedience and death. The wooden boy who cannot stay dead becomes the only character free enough to refuse a dictator. The film is about mortality and disobedience, and it treats both as gifts.
David Bradley voices Geppetto as a man hollowed out by loss. He builds Pinocchio to replace his dead son Carlo and resents the boy for not being him. Gregory Mann voices both Carlo and Pinocchio, and he plays the puppet as relentless curiosity that questions every rule put in front of it. Ewan McGregor narrates as Sebastian J. Cricket, a pompous insect who lives in the puppet’s chest and keeps getting crushed for his trouble. Ron Perlman hardens the Podestà into a small-town fascist who sees a deathless boy as the perfect soldier. Finn Wolfhard plays his son Candlewick as a child being beaten into a uniform.
Del Toro directs with Mark Gustafson, and the two shoot the entire film in stop-motion. The puppets carry the fingerprints of the people who moved them. Pinocchio himself is a deliberate mess of raw pine, with nails left jutting from his head and a body that looks carved in a single grieving night. The script by del Toro and Patrick McHale strips the Disney varnish off Carlo Collodi and lets the boy die over and over, visiting a chalk-white afterlife each time. The production design sets warm sawdust workshops against the cold geometry of fascist banners and youth camps. Nothing here hides the labor, and that visible labor is the point.
This is del Toro working at full strength. He takes a children’s story everyone thinks they know and uses it to ask whether a good life is one that ends. Geppetto wants a son who obeys. The state wants a boy who marches. Pinocchio gives neither what they demand, and the film treats his refusal as the closest thing to a soul. The result is a fable about death that earns its sentiment by refusing to look away from it.