Making Sense of Guillermo Del Toro

 "Pinocchio" is a very strange project for Del Toro to be making. This is a man who has more-or-less made his living off of earnest fantasy films in the shape of a horror movie, and here he's kind of inverting that: a very sincere attempt to engage with Mussolini fascism in the shape of a fantasy movie for kids. Yes, he's worked in animation plenty, and yes, he's worked in tropes from fairy tales often, so maybe the ingredients are there. I don't think he's all that successful at balancing all of the elements at play.

 There are two things that GDT's Pinocchio has going for it. One is the animation. It's done in stop motion, with actual puppets, which is nice and all, but the real highlight for me is the sets. The backgrounds are (all?) hand crafted, from a town square to a mountain range to an ocean. All look stunning. It's a highpoint for physically there animation, just as much as any LAIKA production that has pushed boundaries in recent years. I was amazed at the creativity on display in the afterlife location. Thing two is the sheer ambition of the themes that Del Toro attempts to tackle. This is Pinocchio for the antifascist age, with a Mussolini Youth military training camp taking the role of Pleasure Island in the traditional Pinocchio story. Mussolini is a character, but what stands out is how his presence permeates the backgrounds at all times. Propaganda posters are used as set dressing; this is the kind of thing one might take for granted in a live action movie, but it feels more pronounced here as your brain recognizes that someone had to specifically make these. There's a real effort to depict catholic guilt, and an even larger real effort to engage with accepting death as a growth process. I feel that last part is by far the most successful, relating humanity to mortality and fleshing out all of the characters by how they process grief. The war and religious aspects are neat to have, and it's especially neat to kind of turn the moral of the Pinocchio story on its head. Obedience to your dad is basically what a fascist wants, the movie argues, and Pinocchio being an independent thinker is actually good in that context. Fair enough. The problem is that Del Toro has done all of this before in his plethora of other gothic fairy tales.

 The other issue is that this particular film gets so bogged down in its themes that it doesn't really work on a narrative level. I guess there's room for debate here - if everyone knows the basic outline of this story, do we need to depict them? Can't we just spend the entire run time exploring newer, more creative concepts? Plenty of people will think that way and overlook how little there is to anything from a character perspective. "Sebastian" Cricket is introduced to us with a clear arc, that he will start selfish and then use his wish to save Pinocchio, and then he spends so little time being in the film that his struggles to be a conscience and his redemption to being selfless don't mean anything. This applies to pretty much everyone - Geppetto is burdened (the script's the favorite word) by Pinocchio until he isn't, which doesn't matter because a large majority of that relationship happens off-screen. The plot is overly episodic with little emotional through-line. Plenty of good and smart people will overlook that to praise the artistry, but with a two hour run time I wasn't quite able to get there. I hope Del Toro gets back to sincere romances soon - that's the zone where I enjoy him the most.