Guillermo Del Toro Has Done the Impossible: Make a Good ‘Pinocchio’ Remake
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: There’s a new Pinocchio movie. No, not Robert Zemeckis’ apocalyptically bad live-action adaptation of the 1940 Disney film. And no, not Pinocchio: A True Story, a film nobody in recorded history has seen, but whose star Pauly Shore’s legendarily camp line reading of “Father, when can I leave to be on my own?” brought great joy to the internet at the beginning of the year. I’m talking about Guillermo del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson’s stop-motion film, a passion project that’s taken over a decade to get made.
After spending an eternity in development hell before getting picked up by Netflix, del Toro’s vision of Pinocchio finally premiered at this year’s London Film Festival. With so many different adaptations in existence (this is the third this year alone), I was nervous heading into del Toro’s film. Does the world really need another freaking movie about a wooden puppet come to life? What can this film possibly offer that we haven’t seen countless times before?
Thankfully, del Toro’s passion project answers both of those questions with a resounding “yes.” This Pinocchio (2022) is leagues ahead of its long-nosed competitors, though that’s an admittedly low bar. The film manages to find something new and exciting, taking a considerable number of liberties from Carlo Collodi’s original novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, while capturing a lot of what makes the story so timeless.