Pinocchio (2022)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson. Starring (voices) David Bradley, Ewan McGregor, Gregory Mann, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Tom Kenny, John Turturro. [PG]

Long-awaited animated retelling of Carlo Collodi’s book, “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” freed from the influence of the classic Disney version from 1940. Some of the revised story beats and general incidents will be familiar, but del Toro and company emphasize the dark, sad nature of their story—an old man trying to replace his dead son with a puppet—and filter it through the filmmaker’s recurrent juvenile imagination, outcast empathy, fantasy-horror, and anti-fascist themes/motifs. No sympathetic shortcuts are taken (would you expect the voice of Walder Frey from “Game of Thrones” to ever emerge from the mouth of “kindly” Gepetto?), no designs are rounded out or softened for marketability (the talking cricket’s appearance could have almost come out of del Toro’s subterranean giant-insect thriller Mimic), and no life lesson is cheapened for the small fries—the movie is suitable for most children, but I expect only the older and more mature ones will appreciate it. Rich, textured animation looks like its nestled in the uncanny valley between stop-motion and computer graphics (in a good way). The movie doesn’t quite work as a semi-musical, however, since the only memorable song comes during the closing credits, an incongruously silly moment that doesn’t fit with the film’s prevailing tone; this is where the undue comparisons to the Disney cartoon are hard to dismiss , since “When You Wish Upon a Star”, “I’ve Got No Strings” and “Give a Little Whistle” are simply too inseparable from the story as we now know it. Also known as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio.

81/100