Of course, the Hitler Youth enlists Pinocchio in Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation
This ain’t your daddy’s Pinocchio. Guillermo del Toro imagines a horrific, beautifully, and thoroughly weird take on the classic
Aux News Pinocchio
Pinocchio, the timeless tale of a sad, virgin carpenter who has to resort to building a wooden child because he never fathered one of his own, is getting an update courtesy of Guillermo del Toro. And he’s really going for it. Rather than simply remake Disney’s classic 1940 film, del Toro’s enlisted everyone’s favorite Italian puppet in the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the Italian fascist youth organization that started after World War I.
“He is recruited into the village military camp, because the fascist official in town thinks if this puppet cannot die, it would make the perfect soldier,” del Toro told Vanity Fair. Glorious. Simply glorious. We’d expect nothing more from the guy who won an Academy Award for Best Picture for his woman bangs Creature From The Black Lagoon movie.
Del Toro’s stop-motion adaptation takes place in pre-World War II Italy as fascism starts to rise. So why does this version turn Pinocchio into “the perfect soldier” while Disney painstakingly and unnecessarily recreates the colors and textures of a movie they made nearly 100 years ago? Ultimately, del Toros says, his film “couldn’t be more different than any other version of Pinocchio in our spiritual or philosophical goals.” And also, because del Toro sees a kinship between Pinocchio and Frankenstein.
“They are both about a child that is thrown into the world. They are both created by a father who then expects them to figure out what’s good, what’s bad, the ethics, the morals, love, life, and essentials, on their own. I think that was, for me, childhood. You had to figure it out with your very limited experience.”
The film also aims its cruel lens on Geppetto (Game Of Thrones’ David Bradley) and Jiminy Cricket, named Sebastian (voiced by Ewan McGregor) in del Toro’s film. According to del Toro, as a child, he loved how “the cricket keeps getting killed over and over again and crushed and maimed,” so that’ll happen in the movie, too. Meanwhile, our favorite Italian carpenter carves our wooden boy out of the tree that grew from his dead son’s grave. Repeat after us: “One ticket to Pinocchio, please.”
Nevertheless, the director believes that this family-friendly film is for “children and adults that talk to each other.”
“These are times that demand from kids a complexity that is tremendous. Far more daunting, I think, than when I was a child. Kids need answers and reassurances.” Perhaps those kids will be asking their parents, “Mommy, why does the cricket have to die?”
Check out some incredible pictures from the film at Vanity Fair. Seriously, this thing looks gorgeous.
Pinocchio turns into a real movie this December on Netflix.
36 Comments
In fairness, what he’s describing *is* Pinocchio if you look at the actual story. It’s a story where Pinocchio at one point gets lynched and there is a weird prison/army subplot.I don’t know that it’s what the world is craving in a family-friendly movie, but the Disney version is super streamlined and cleaned up.
and even the Disney one is actually so terrifying and that’s the tidied up version?!? This gonna be a freak film.
The Disney live action one is going to be uncanny as hell and I think that will actually help hah
“In fairness, what he’s describing *is* Pinocchio if you look at the actual story.”
Really? Carlo Collodi, writer of the 1883 The Adventures of Pinocchio book, foresaw the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany?
“These are times that demand from kids a complexity that is tremendous. Far more daunting, I think, than when I was a child. Kids need answers and reassurances.” Perhaps those kids will be asking their parents, “Mommy, why does the cricket have to die?”I mean I love Guillermo, but man, that’s …weird.
The quote ends at “Kids need answers and reassurances.”, so I’m guessing the rest is all Matt, especially since there’s nothing of the sort in the Vanity Fair article.
I think you’re right, but even so this approach to answers and reassurances seems tenuous at best.
OK, in my defense, I was pretty high when I wrote that comment and was seriously confused about the punctuation in a way that I totally am not now.
Also in your defense, it’s not made obvious that the cricket question is just Matt’s attempt at humor, rather than a direct quote missing proper quotation marks (a mistake I see all too often in internet articles); I had to check the original Variety piece to make sure it wasn’t something del Toro said.
You know what, if kids need to be detraumatised from cricket death then they can always watch The Last Emperor.
“ Stay wood, kid”. The best version of them all.
I saw the headline and came here to object that the story is supposed to take place in Italy rather than Germany, but I saw the article itself doesn’t say that. I know lots of places have headlines written by different people than the articles, but I didn’t think AVC could afford that division of labor.
It’s almost like the person writing the headline doesn’t give a shit.
If the person writing the article doesn’t give a shit, why would the person writing the headline?
And Italian Fascism, while evil, was nowhere near the level of Nazism. I’d rate it more on the level of Franco’s Falange in Spain, so comparing its youth wing to the Hitler Youth is a bit trite.
It’s Fascism with Italian efficiency, not German efficiency.
“We’re totally going to oppress people at some point, but first we need to stop down at the bistro.”
You know that Hitler and Mussolini were two different people?
Whether it succeeds or fails, don’t we want – if they must remake stories at all – for filmmakers to not “simply remake” them?
And this is del Toro, who has a pretty good track record. Even the films of his I don’t like (the recent remake of Nightmare Alley topping that short list) are beautiful, I’ll admit.
I don’t think anyone’s saying he needs to stick to the Disneyfied version, just that this one sounds pretty out there (as you’d expect from del Toro).
“This ain’t your daddy’s Pinocchio.”As the article mentions, Disney’s version came out in 1940… how old is the readership here?
There are too many Pinocchio movies these days. Please eliminate three.
I am not a crackpot.
We’d expect nothing more from the guy who won an Academy Award for Best Picture for his woman bangs Creature From The Black Lagoon movie.
Why is this your DelToro comparison and not, you know, the movie about the Spanish Civil War?
The Creature From The Black Lagoon had bangs?
They were just always slicked down so it was hard to tell, but yes.
…building a wooden child because he never fathered one of his own……carves our wooden boy out of the tree that grew from his dead son’s grave…Huh?
Ok, maybe the puppet can’t die, but surely it can be shot up into a million pieces?
Or thrown in a fireplace?
I suppose there’s more than one way to skin an immortal . . . cat.
Hey cool! There are TWO Pinocchio movies coming out this year for me to take a hard pass on.
Despite the shitty writing in this ‘article,’ this got me excited for this film (as if I need another reason beside ‘it’s a Guillermo del Toro movie’).
So where does Pauly Shore come in?
…your mom…
If Gepetto really was a virgin, I strongly doubt he’d be spending his fake-person carving time on making a kid.But if he did…I guarantee that Pinocchio would have gotten Gepetto arrested once he got brought to life.
“Pinocchio, the timeless tale of a sad, virgin carpenter”“Italian carpenter carves our wooden boy out of the tree that grew from his dead son’s grave”So which is it, Matt?