YMMV / Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

• Awesome Music:
  • "We Were a King Once", Count Volpe's Villain Song, is a wonderfully sinister number detailing Volpe's nefarious ambitions for Pinocchio. Of particular interest is the strange phrasing of the song's title, which implies that Volpe is trying to seem like he is talking about the carnival, when in fact he wants all the glory for himself.
  • The Rabbits' gothic dirge, "The Late Lamented", is one of the best songs in the film, despite being very short.
  • Pinocchio's "Fatherland March" is very catchy and upbeat, verging on Do Not Do This Cool Thing territory, considering its subject matter. Of course, it becomes a Funny Moment later on, when Pinocchio changes the lyrics to be scatological and mocking, and then has the sheer balls to sing them directly to Mussolini's face.
• Accidental Aesop: As Sebastian learns, the mark of a good teacher isn't what you teach your student, but what your student teaches you. Even though it was his task to teach the little wooden boy to be good, Pinocchio taught Sebastian what's good just as much as he did him.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Just how sociopathic was the Podestà? He orders his son (Candlewick) to shoot Pinocchio in order to prove his worth as a soldier. The Podestà knows that Pinocchio is immortal and even recruited him for this reason. Would he have forced his son to shoot Pinocchio (or a human boy) if Pinocchio was mortal, or did he only do so because he thought that there would be no real consequences of shooting an immortal being?
• Award Snub: When the film premiered, many pundits speculated that it could become the fourth animated film in history to receive a Best Picture nomination at the Academy Awards, given how loved Del Toro is within the industry, and how his previous film, Nightmare Alley (2021), had scored a nomination despite having mixed reviews. Those ambitions slowly faded as awards season went on, but it seemed likely to receive nominations for Best Score and Best Song. And after BAFTA nominated it for Production Design, that seemed to be on the table too. In the end, the film only received one Academy Award nomination, for Best Animated Feature, which it won.
• Complete Monster: The Podestà is the film's Fascist equivalent to the Coachman. A firm dedicant of Mussolini, the Podestà runs a military camp where children—including his own emotionally-abused son Candlewick, whom the Podestà despises for his weakness—are trained to become unthinking, unfeeling Child Soldiers, hoping to squeeze all their humanity out until nothing is left but the urge to kill and die for Fascist Italy. When he learns Pinocchio is immortal, the Podestà tries to make an immortal child soldier out of him as well, and when Candlewick and Pinocchio befriend each other during an exercise the Podestà coldly orders Candlewick to shoot Pinocchio anyway. Although indicated to have Hidden Depths at first, the Podestà is devoted to Fascism at the expense of everything else, promptly disowning Candlewick when the boy refuses to fall in line.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Pinocchio's song about Il Duce is nothing more than him repeatedly singing that Mussolini is a piece of poop to get under his skin, complete with an actual poop puppet. And it works. Mussolini then orders Pinocchio to be shot.
• Fanfic Fuel: Due to the ending showing Pinocchio not becoming a real boy and going off to wander the Earth after his family has passed away over the years from age, it leaves plenty room to write about his following adventures.
• Friendly Fandoms: There is major overlap between the fandoms of this film and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Not only do both films have similar themes (such as the personification of Death having a major role, and the protagonist learning to appreciate his final life after being brought back from the dead multiple times), but The Last Wish even has one of the villains being upstaged by Pinocchio as part of his backstory, and features a parody of the Talking Cricket attempting to act as a conscience for him. Even when Pinocchio beat The Last Wish at the Oscars for Best Animated Feature, most fans of the latter weren't particularly upset by it.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Sebastian Cricket keeps a portrait of the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer by his desk. In a later scene, Count Volpe is listening to the finale of Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, which Wagner was partly inspired to write thanks to reading Schopenhauer. At the end of the film, Sebastian changes out the picture of Schopenhauer for a picture of Pinocchio, Geppetto and Spazzatura. This comes just after Sebastian affirms that life is a wonderful gift - a refutation of Schopenhauer's famously antinatalist views (that life is not a gift, but a horrible curse).
  • The wood sprite's lower half looks like a serpent's tail and she is base on the seraph, the word used many times in the bible to denote a snake and even some despiction of the Seraph had them snake like.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Count Volpe is an abusive but mostly humorous villain for most of the film until we see him physically abusing Spazzatura and directly threatening Pinocchio, saying he will control and exploit him for profit until he rots. And then comes his Villainous Breakdown, whereupon he graduates to attempted murder and tries to immolate Pinocchio to make him "burn bright like a star." It's this act of depravity that almost immediately earns him a Karmic Death afterward.
  • Likewise, the Podestà, despite being a child-indoctrinating Fascist, is teased midway through the film at possibly having good qualities; when the Podestà's abused son Candlewick confides to Pinocchio about his strained relationship with his father, Pinocchio reassures him that fathers are flawed and sometimes say things they don't truly mean. Except the Podestà truly is devoted to Fascism at the expense of everything else; when Candlewick refuses the Podestà's order to "shoot the puppet," the Podestà disowns him and prepares to kill Pinocchio in front of him. Again, he causes his own Karmic Death within a minute of crossing this.
• Narm: Cathartic though it may be, the circumstances of the Podestà's death are so over-the-top (he's not just killed in the explosion, the Allied bomb drops directly on top of him) that it comes off as a bit silly in an otherwise dead-serious scene.
• Nausea Fuel: The Dogfish's belly is full of disgusting, bubbling gastric acid that Pinocchio and Spazzatura both fall into. His blowhole is also full of pulsating blisters, making his sneezing scene look quite unpleasant.
• Older Than They Think:
  • The concept of Pinocchio dealing with war isn't unheard of as in 1917 Collodi's nephew Paolo Lorenzini published a continuation of the story called The Heart of Pinocchio in which Pinocchio, now a real boy, enlists to fight the Austrians and partially returns in puppet form due to the prosthetics given to him after sustaining injuries in battle.
  • This is not the first adaptation of Pinocchio to expand Geppetto's backstory by adding the loss of his own family. The Italian miniseries The Adventures of Pinocchio from 1972 did something similar by making Geppetto a widower and the Blue Fairy the ghost of his late wife.
  • This is also not the first time where the Fox has been turned into a human with fox-like features. In fact, there was a Italian adaptation in 2019 (which is Truer to the Text) where both Fox and the Cat were turned into humans with fox and cat-like features (and otherwise, they did exactly same things their book counterparts did). Bonus that Count Volpe actually very much resembles the Fox from that movie (though, it's unlikely it was intentional).
• One-Scene Wonder: Mussolini's scene, where he is given much build-up as the long limousine edges closer, only to reveal this Mussolini as a comically short man who upon sitting down to watch the show, is treated to a mockery as Pinocchio and Spazzatura essentially just sing about him being a piece of poop over and over, upon which he just responds that he "does not like these puppets" and orders Pinocchio shot. Mussolini being voiced by Tom Kenny helps a bunch.
• Spiritual Successor: Del Toro sees this movie as a successor to The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth, given that all three have an emphasis on children dealing with the horrors of war.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The opening notes of "My Son" sound a little like those of "Duo" and "Generique Fin" from Delicatessen.
• Tear Dryer: It's minor, but even though Sebastian Cricket dies along with the rest of Pinocchio's family, we see him in the afterlife chatting with the bunnies about the events of the movie before finally getting the chance to sing his song after getting it interrupted so many times.
• Ugly Cute: Pinocchio himself. Geppetto built him while drunk, so he only has one ear, his proportions are extremely janky, he has nails sticking out of his back, and he is unpainted. This ties into the movie's themes - and Del Toro's general philosophy - that it's okay to be imperfect. It's also ironic how this iteration of Pinocchio is meant to be a crude and janky puppet yet manages to be more pleasing to the eye than some other depictions of Pinocchio that often fall into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley.
• Uncertain Audience: While not as egregious as some other examples, a major criticism of the film is that as a darker retelling of the original with a lot of heavy adult themes, but at the same time it still maintains a number of juvenile elements and song numbers, which can be a turn-off for older audiences.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Occupies a strange place here. Beat-for-beat the film is mostly child-friendly. The optimistic characters, the lighthearted humour and the musical numbers deliberately keep the film at an accessible PG rating. That said, del Toro has said the film was not designed for children or even necessarily as a family picture: "It’s not made for kids but kids can watch it if their parents talk to them." Despite the lighthearted leanings, the film still does have unabashedly mature content that could be considered questionable or even inappropriate for the younger viewers; aside from some gruesome violence (the obligatory Disney Villain Death does not spare a look at the impact and subsequent mangled corpse of one villain) the film's central themes involve waxing on mortality and Who Wants to Live Forever? (complete with the wooden Pinocchio outliving all his loved ones) and the setting is reimagined as Fascist Italy, complete with innocent child soldiers being conditioned and sent out to kill.
• The Woobie:
  • Pinocchio. Unlike the original story and his many adaptations, this version of the titular character was made not out of love, but out of Geppetto's grief at losing his child, Carlo, during the Great War, and his body is highly distorted due to Geppetto building him in a fit of a drunken rage. Not only he's ostracized by the townsfolk for being a living puppet (they assume is a "work of the devil" or "a witchcraft"), but Geppetto constantly demanding him to behave like Carlo instead of let him be his own person, forced Pinocchio to join the circus to get some money for his father.
  • Carlo, Geppetto's former child, was a 10 years old boy who got killed by a bomb dropped from a war plane while he was still inside the church during the Great War. To make his death even more tragic and to further emphasize how war is meaningless, the reason why the bomb was dropped in the first place was because the passing war planes were returning to their airbases and needed to "lighten their loads", never intending to target the town.
  • Gepetto himself is a lonely old man driven to alcoholism by the tragic death of his son many years ago (in addition to being a widower).
  • Candlewick, the son of the Podestà who abuses him. His nickname comes from his father calling him weak, while he desperately tries to make his father proud. His father sends him to a military training camp and demands he shoots his new friend and throws him into a trench. And shortly after, he is likely killed in an explosion.
• Woolseyism: The Latin American Spanish dub offers a quite bizarre example: Pinocchio's "Fatherland March"'s lyrics in that version are more offensive, as while the original English lyrics used PG language which you normally hear from a child, the Spanish version of the song used more vulgar words to describe Mussolini, including calling him "a shitting geezer"^note In Spanish, viejo cagón in Spanish. The bizarre part comes with the fact that this is the only part of the whole film that the Latin Spanish dub of the film resorts on using any kind of profanity. Moreover, Guillermo del Toro himself was the one who gave the OK of that version, being Mexican himself and the dub was done in Mexico, so it's very likely the Spanish lyrics were originally intended for the English version as well, considering that he isn't afraid on using vulgar language in many of his previous films, but considering Pinoccio being a child, it's very likely he didn't for the original version.^note In Mexico, it's not exactly unusual to hear children to swear in local media, compared with the U.S. and other Anglophone countries, hence the dissonance.

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