Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

This film was shot, of course, as they would have written earlier, “based on” the fairy tale of Collodi. Only the characters (and not all of them) remained from the original work, and they were transformed in order, and the most general idea is that a wooden boy turns into a real one after serious life trials. Everything else here is del Toro, this is his author’s fairy tale, filled with his reflections and symbols, it is connected with his previous films much more than with the story of Collodi, so it’s not for nothing that the name of the director was added to the title.

Firstly, the action takes place in fascist Italy, which immediately, as you can understand, places accents differently. Some hands raised in a fascist greeting are worth something. And the announcement of Pinocchio as a ‘dissident’ even more so. And we will also meet Mussolini himself here.

Secondly, the psychological background and motivation of the heroes’ actions are changing. For example, Gepetto del Toro creates a wooden boy out of longing for his long-dead son, longing to ‘revive’ him. And Gepetto Collodi wanted to create a wooden doll to wander around the world with her and make a living from it. For the rest of the characters, respectively, everything changes just as dramatically.

Thirdly, as a result, new characters appear and the old ones are greatly modified. The monkey Spazzatura appears, a poor and disenfranchised assistant of a character who was called Manjafoko (our Karabas Barabas) by Collodi, and here is called Count Volpe. Count Volpe, by the way, is also very interesting, at least because his surname translates as ‘Fox’, i.e. the characters of Manjafoko, Fox and Cat merged in him. Wick Collodi is an ordinary boy who does not want to go to school, with whom Pinocchio escapes to the Land of Entertainment, here he becomes the son of the fascist head of the city, and he and Pinocchio find themselves together in a children’s military camp. The cricket turns from a minor into one of the main characters and becomes one of the closest creatures to Pinocchio, he literally ‘lives in his heart’. Into whom the Fairy has transformed – it is necessary to see)

Fourth, another world appears, into which the hero enters after death, and more than once. Interestingly, Collodi does not have this formally, but implicitly, it always seemed to me that this idea is very present.

Yes, in the end, the film turned out to be not quite childish, but still much softer than “The Labyrinth of the Faun”. And I probably agree with the opinion already expressed that “Pinocchio” may turn out to be the best creation of del Toro.

P.S. The cricket writer, having settled in a new place of residence, put a portrait of Schopenhauer on the wall, which has not yet been seen in any cartoon)