When I was a kid I had a thick(ish) version of The Adventures of Pinocchio. I'd love to see it now, because from memory I'm pretty sure it was a condensation of Carlo Collodi's original, mixed with an off-brand remix of the Disney elements. The Cat and the Fox where in it, as well as a gorilla judge and a ton of incidents they would have never have time for in Disney's movie, but the cricket isn't a ghost, it's a whale that swallows Gepetto, and the final chase was pretty much taken from the movie as well.
The 1940 adaptation of Pinocchio holds a strange place in the Disney canon. It's thorny, unconventional relic of when their films hadn't yet set into formula, and they were allowed to have a generous heaping of darkness. It's easy to see what's drawn countless filmmakers throughout the years to it, and Guillermo del Toro seems as good a candidate as any to put his own stamp on the material.
His new stop-motion animated version of Pinocchio gives Pinocchio's creation a backstory: Gepetto the carpenter (David Bradley) had a son, you see, a perfect and obedient boy who died in the first world war. As the second war looms, Gepetto is still a broken man, drunkenly crying over his son's grave until a benevolent, Ghibliesque forest spirit (Tilda Swinton) takes pity on the carpenter and gives life to one of his marionettes to be a new son (voiced by Gregory Mann).
Gepetto's reaction is... naturalistic and not very enthusiastic, which gives the material a little bite - Pinocchio is born with nothing but love and adoration for his newly found father, but he's also a rambunctious, slightly amoral creature that immediately tests his father's patience and goodwill.
It's a great setup that sets out themes that the movie will explore- Pinocchio is automatically and unfairly set to be forever compared to Gepetto's possibly idealized memories of his previous son, and there's an emphasis on how our actions can strain our relationships with those we love. His almost elemental nature also lends itself well to learning about compassion and about good and evil... yeah, it's a pretty clever twist on the original.
Jiminy Cricket (Ewan McGregor) also makes an appearance, tasked by the wood sprite to be Pinocchio's conscience. In the original book (not the one I had as a kid) Pinocchio famously kills him with a hammer early on, after which he rises as a ghost to haunt the puppet with his counsel.
As an aside, I would respect the fuck out of any version that stuck with this: if that isn't a brilliant representation of guilt making us want to be better people, I don't know what is.
Here the cricket survives that but barely figures in the story, despite being the narrator; He's just a punching bag to be squished as comic relief, or there to explain a few teachable moments to his young charge. He does get the film's biggest laugh, though, with an impeccably timed instance of Liricus Interruptus.
Once the busy introduction is out of the way, Pinocchio is free to start getting into trouble, first with a travelling circus, and then with the film's other big introduced DelToro-ism, the town's podestá (basically, a mayor appointed by Mussolini's regime, voiced by Ron Perlman) and the fascist establishment. The second world war is an active player here, letting the movie introduce a (very funny) caricature of Il Ducce (Tom Kenny, Spongebob hisself!) and a late-film stop at a brownshirt youth camp.
Pinocchio's wild streak gets him separated from his family, with Gepetto and the Cricket hunting for him and having their own misadventures. Like all the other versions, this one is a bit episodic, but the script (developed by DelToro and Patrick McHale, who was the driving force behind the beyond-excellent Over the Garden Wall) does a great job of establishing a narrative and thematic through-line as Pinocchio evolves and learns to balance duty, his conscience, and being faithful to himself.
I did find the resolutions to the various threads a little underwhelming. One thing that often gets brought up about the Disney version (not necessarily as a problem) is that none of the villains get any comeuppance, which I think is brilliant and a surprisingly mature take. It might not make for a traditionally satisfying narrative, but it hammers home that what's important is what Pinocchio is taking away from the encounters with the various scumbags he runs across, not what happens to them.
Del Toro and McHale seem to have taken exception with this, sadly, and the film makes a point of giving the bad guys what they deserve, resulting in some of the (to me) weakest moments in the film.
It's easy to forgive, though, since the film otherwise manages to hit its themes hard and look stunningly beautiful at every turn. The analog nature of the project really gives it a tactility and luminosity characteristic of stop-motion; It lacks the purism of, say, Henry Sellick's work (the water here is digital, for example), but Del Toro's distinctive vision and the talented animation team make every scene a treat. It's a gorgeous, luscious world that they have created, and the movie would be worth watching just to get lost in it.
There are a lot of songs, most of them catchy enough and with some humorously skewed lyrics, some really outstanding character and monster design -Pinocchio's initially inhuman motion and a sphinx-like creature are standouts- and there are some fun visual call-backs to The Devil's Backbone and others. This is not quite in the same league as those earlier films - it's overstuffed and the script doesn't quite make sense of all its disparate elements in as elegant a way as, say Pan's Labyrinth- but it's definitely Guillermo Del Toro's best movie since, and certainly one of his most beautiful.
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