As you might expect from the billing, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio — which had its world premiere at the BFI London Film Festival today — is a very different beast to the 1940 Disney animation, a…
today — is a very different beast to the 1940 Disney animation, and just as cavalier with the picaresque elements of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel. The factor that unifies all three is that the main character — a wooden puppet blessed with life — longs to be a real, human boy, but it’s no spoiler to reveal that del Toro, champion of monsters and misfits, doesn’t see the appeal of that.
It begins with that very subject, sketching in the backstory of Gepetto , a carpenter and “model Italian citizen” whose masterpiece — a crucified Christ commissioned by the local priest — is left unfinished after his young son Carlo is killed in church by a bomb blast in 1916. All this is narrated by Sebastian J. Cricket , a talking insect that spends most of the film imparting wisdom, getting squashed , and, after striking a deal with a wood sprite , trying to keep Pinocchio on the straight and narrow. Off the bat, however, Pinocchio is unruly and mischievous , and on his first day of school runs off to join a circus run by the ‘stache-twirling Count Volpe.
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