WesternAnimation Why?
This was not a good adaptation of Pinocchio. At all. Gepetto is an adaptational jerkass who is constantly convinced that Pinocchio will never be good enough because he falls short of his canon foreigner brother Carlo and has to be the one to learn a lesson even though in the book it’s the Jerk with a Heart of Gold Pinocchio who has to learn to mature because of the essentiality of maturation towards being good. In the book, Pinocchio is the one whose goal it is to become a real boy rather than having that goal imposed on him by the fantastic racism of outsiders and in the book his transformation into a real boy is quite obviously a metaphor for maturation whereas in this movie that happy ending never happens. While the fairy with the azure hair despite her original implication that she was something analogous to a ghost was ultimately not a creepy or frightening character. Yet in this movie, she’s practically an Eldritch Abomination. Gepetto’s son Carlo getting killed in the First World War as an adaptational angst upgrade was stupid and pointless on the part of the film, though to be fair it wasn’t as stupid and pointless as the film itself was. It may be theoretically possible to have an adaptation of Pinocchio reset in Mussolini’s Italy to have those wacky Nazis or rather those wacky Fascists as the antagonists and do a good job but this movie doesn’t. While other movies like Kubo did a better job of having a message about having to reconcile yourself with the inevitability of your loved ones dying and other movies like Puss in Boots 2 did a better job having a message about reconciling with the inevitability of your own eventual death. This movie just had it to make it Darker and Edgier than the original book by Collodi. And no, the fact that Disney’s version of the book was Lighter and Softer changes nothing. Especially considering that this movie is actually much closer to the Disney version than it is to the actual book. (And of the two of them the Disney cartoon is actually the closer adaptation).
This movie 1) completely misses the point of the book 2) was creepy beyond all reason (in ways the book wasn’t and 3) was in no way deserving of its Oscar.
WesternAnimation Tastes like Don Bluth
To me, Guillermo Del Toro has always been at most bleh. I'm one of the very few people that didn't like Pan's Labyrinth (even if I admit the movie is visually gorgeous), the best thing about Pacific Rim is the soundtrack and Hellboy felt like a watered down version of the comic mixed with Changeling the Dreaming.
To me, the man has a nice vision for grim but alluring aesthetics and an unhealthy, really unhealthy obsession with fatherhood. Nearly every single of his works that I saw, the theme was present there and felt almost shoehorned into the narrative, making it somewhat disjointed, in some stories, it felt as if he wanted to add more darkness to the narrative, and in the others it felt he didn't want to make it nearly as dark as it was needed.
And then, out of nowhere, it all fits here, in this stop-motion movie.
I don't know if it's because he was given free reign to deal with something that is already creepy and feeric by nature (fairytales and old stories of public domain), but here, everything that I would consider a flaw in his movies fits and enhances it.
Pinnochio isn't a delightful tale about a cute doll that comes to life as a gift. It's a grim tale about dealing with loss, the inevitability of death, how the world around us is messed up... but there is beauty and grandeur to it and because of it. Pinnochio is a walking nightmare of a half-made doll that is the stuff of nightmares, but he is eager to learn and has a raw goodness to his actions. He is a brat, but also in his refusal to listen, he contests authority. He wants good reasons to obey but wants to do good as well.
The movie has earthly color tones and a superb stop motion animation, making it the exact 'tone' of feeric creepy darkness of a german fairy tale (yes I know Pinnochio is Italian) but never too dark to the point I can't see anything that is going on.
The pacing is erratic, but it's on purpose, with the stupidity of fascism being used as a tool to leverage the narrative. A wooden doll that people think its possessed by satan? The local Podestà shuts everyone up because that is a potential fascist soldier and thus he must go to school and learn to obey. But in its eagerness to quell any questions or contestation of any kind, the fascist regime allows the growth of the very thing they want to destroy: Pinnochio's intelligence, curiosity and questions.
The main characters are flawed (but never wander too deeply into jerkass territory) trying their best in trying times and, as expected, this also ties in with the theme of acceptance and fatherhood so... yeah I really liked this movie.
If I had to point out two major flaws, was that the songs and soundtrack were lackluster, and the theater arc lasted far too long, snubbing the 'toyland' part of the movie. Imagine if Del Toro hit harder, with a toyland focused on making the kids give in to their destructive impulses towards minorities, earning them the title of 'donkeys'.
In the end, I felt like the critic in Ratatouille, brought to his childhood of dark grim tales with earned happy endings and bittersweet needed lessons. It tastes like Don Bluth, and I love it.
WesternAnimation No denying it's Guillermo del Toro's.
I have a soft spot for stop-motion films and Gris Grimly, and since del Toro had been wanting to make a stop-motion film for so long, I wanted to see how it turned out.
The film is obviously a del Toro production—it mixes horror and fantasy and discusses abusive fathers, fascism, and blind obedience in the ways his films tend to do, but I think the del Toro part of the title is often at the cost of the Pinocchio part. There are aspects I found to be compelling changes— I really liked the idea of Pinocchio being a replacement for a lost son, and the way his creation was framed as a drunk mistake on a really bad night, complete with Frankenstein theming. I almost wish that setup had gone into a new direction about accepting death with the concept that replacing/resurrecting the son was the wrong thing to do, rather than it being Geppetto's story about accepting imperfection in his second chance. I'm okay with the character arc being Geppetto's, but the way it went felt counter to the original story in a way I didn't latch onto. I'm also not sure about Pinocchio's arc.
I can get behind how the film defies the stricter moralism of the original story by showing cases where lying and disobedience are noble or necessary and shifts it to a story of Pinocchio learning and teaching about recognizing when to obey and when to be free, but it fuels a commentary on fascism we've already seen from del Toro, and done better before, too. I don't think taking the message to a younger audience under the lens of fascist history was the best idea. I struggle to see it landing when I wasn't sure what the film was doing with the message myself.
The animation is gorgeous and has a great eye for character physicality, though I'd have liked this film to be more fantastical and diversely-colored than it was. I don't love the indecisive tone where some famous fantasy scenes have been replaced with reality, but others are still there. Again, the del Toro takes away some of the Pinocchio.
This film isn't something that blew my mind, but it did entertain me well enough. I think this is a case of Creator Thumbprint going too far in front of the source material, but it's for sure more respectable than clueless adaptations like Burton's Alice in Wonderland.