Guillermo del Toro explains why Pinocchio is now one of his monsters

Guillermo del Toro was always aware of his desire to be a maker. PinocchioIt was a stop-motion animated movie. It was the perfect medium to tell his story about a puppet coming to life. He would also be able fulfill his 30 year-old dream of creating an animated feature. He tells his story of Pinocchio would allow him to explore what he saw as the “sacred” bond between puppet and animator through the arcane practical techniques of stop-motion.

But he also knew he wanted to make profound changes to the source material, Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century children’s book about a naughty puppet who learns obedience and selflessness. He actually wanted to reverse it and stop-motion would be a great tool. Del Toro found a poetic irony in telling Pinocchio’s tale this way, he recently told Polygon.

“Very poignantly, it becomes a movie about a puppet in a world of people that don’t know they’re puppets,” he says. “But they Are puppets. Everyone is one puppet there. The one who behaves the least like a puppet, is the one everyone thinks is one! I thought there was something delicious in that.”

That irony is at the heart of del Toro’s distinctive Netflix take on the tale, which redefines both the setting And the morality of Collodi’s Pinocchio. He relocates the action to Mussolini’s Italy, and re-creates Pinocchio himself as an anarchic force who liberates the humans he meets, rather than learning to conform with them. It has much in common with del Toro’s Spanish-set horror movies The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which present a child’s-eye view of midcentury fascism.

Image courtesy of Netflix

“The three of them are about innocence and war, and dictatorships, fading or active, and how it trickles down into everyday life, or family, or aTown, or a little church, or a little life,” del Toro says. “I think one of the themes that links Pan’s Labyrinth to Pinocchio directly is disobedience as a virtue — which is a real countermovement to the traditional story of Pinocchio, which is, ‘If you obey, you’ll become a real kid.’ In this, it’s ‘If you disobey, you will always have been real to yourself,’ you know?”

When del Toro is asked why he continues to return to the same era or the same setting, he responds that he felt the same feeling in his childhood. It was a deep fear and mistrust about the world. This fear was not less than the one he had in childhood. “It was not NormalIt was the fear that I experienced as a youngster, even though I was comfortable in my family’s peace. But I did feel it,” he says emphatically.

“On the one hand, you’re handed the world of childhood, which is permeated by fairies and wishes and magical worlds. You are also interacting with brutality and human cruelty. See also: it. I mean, it’s impossible for a kid not to see it. And everybody’s telling you things that you see them constantly not believing, or breaking the rules that they tell you you should obey. This paradox is essential in how disorienting and scary childhood was for me.”

Image courtesy of Netflix

Del Toro’s take on PinocchioIt is equally concerned about what it takes to be a parent and a child. It spends “a disproportionate amount of time” with Geppetto, Pinocchio’s creator, who in this version makes the puppet in a drunken bout of grief and rage over the death of his son, Carlo. The scene of Pinocchio’s creation is shot in a sinister, frightening way, like a Frankenstein movie. Del Toro’s fascination with monsters is what makes him so famous.

“Yes, in a way he is. Certainly in this movie,” del Toro says. “I mean, a monster for me is the anomaly that tests the world. […] This man has asked, almost like in a horror tale: ‘I want my child back.’ And the child comes back in a way that he doesn’t recognize, and has a slight unholy, almost elemental energy due to the resurrection. And I think it is very important that Geppetto prays for a miracle, and when the miracle occurs, he’s unhappy. Because he knows. DoesGet what you want.

“Geppetto, who’s obsessed with perfection […]Learn that imperfections and the truth of things are your only source for wisdom in this world. Not to search perfection but to learn Impairment as a virtue.”

Guillermo del Toro’s PinocchioYou can stream Netflix right now