Film Review: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is charming with impeccable attention to detail 

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio - (L-R) Gepetto (voiced by David Bradley) and Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann). Picture: Netflix © 2022 

★★★★☆

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (PG) is an animated tale that opens in 1916, with narrator, Sebastian J Cricket ( Ewan McGregor), telling how woodworker, Geppetto (David Bradley), lost his beloved son, Carlo (Gregory Mann), to a bomb dropped on their village.

A decade or so on, in the depths of a raging alcoholic misery, Geppetto carves a crude wooden boy from the pine tree growing over Carlo’s grave, and is stunned when the carving springs to life.

Indeed, del Toro’s Pinocchio is largely faithful to Carlo Collidi’s original tale, although this version is set in Mussolini-era Italy, with Pinocchio (also voiced by Gregory Mann) a fizzing ball of chaos denounced as “a dissident, an independent free-thinker” by the village’s fascist leader. That’s the backdrop for Pinocchio’s adventures, and while the wicked impresario, Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), and the great leviathan that swallows him whole place Pinocchio in familiar peril, the story takes great pleasure in mocking the pretensions of the bombastic Mussolini (Tom Kenny).

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is largely faithful to Carlo Collidi’s original tale.

Ultimately, this Pinocchio is a story of “imperfect fathers and imperfect sons”, the naïve and feckless boy bouncing from one father-figure to another until he learns the truth about love.

The stop-motion animation is charming throughout, the attention to detail impeccable, whether it’s glimpses of Geppetto’s gnarled fingers or its fabulously imagined landscapes. You know the story already but Guillermo del Toro offers a new and timely way of seeing.

(Netflix)