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- When the carving does come to life as Pinocchio, Geppetto cannot help but imagine he sees Carlo, the boy who was lost, in his wooden visage, which leads to Geppetto’s constantly comparing Pinocchio to “a real boy.” Thus the catharsis at the end is Geppetto’s accepting Pinocchio as he is, just as Pinocchio must accept his father’s own mortality.
www.denofgeek.com/movies/guillermo-del-toro-explains-pinocchio-ending-needed-change/Guillermo del Toro Explains Why the Pinocchio Ending Needed ...
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Feb 18, 2023 · After grieving Carlo for so long, and being so angry that Pinocchio isn’t his real son, Geppetto finally accepts the wooden puppet for who he is, and they live out their days together — until Geppetto, Spazzatura, and Cricket die and Pinocchio is left alone in the world.
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Oct 15, 2022 · When Geppetto breaks down and cries by his son’s grave, you not only feel the pain in the vocal performance, but you see the puppet’s difficulty breathing, the trembling of his legs, the ...
- The master has done it again.
- The Best Movie of 2022
By Mustafa Yasar II
Updated: Dec 13, 2022 10:05 pm
Posted: Dec 13, 2022 9:53 pm
This story contains spoilers for Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio. If you haven't watched yet, check out our spoiler-free review of the film.
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio is a lovingly dark, awe-inspiring fable of fear and imperfection. The three decade span of the imaginative director’s fantastical filmography has exposed the significance of the strange and the monstrous in relation to social oppression. And if the scope of Del Toro’s work is a chaotically sprouted, crackling tree like his lying wooden boy’s nose, then Pinocchio - like the oft-repeated motif of a pinecone throughout the film - is the breathing wooden heart at the core of a theme he’s been interrogating for years; strange, lost children, whose coming-of-age encounters with the uncanny reveals the fear that informs dominant, oppressive Western social structures.
In Pinocchio, that structure is Mussolini’s fascist Italy circa World War II, and the fear revealed is between imperfect fathers and imperfect sons, struggling through the pressure of power, greed, the archetypes that structure our expectations of each other, and the humane fear that can corrupt our capacity to support the people we love. Through his collaboration with co-director Mark Gustafson, co-writer Patrick McHale, and their team of dedicated stop-motion animators, Del Toro has filtered the essence of his artistic work into an intensely personal reworking of the classic fable.
Sebastian, still nested in the trunk that becomes the wooden boy’s chest, initially sees Pinocchio as a house, an object to exact his own desires for fame. He’s convinced by the Wood Sprite to mentor Pinocchio in exchange for a future wish that will ensure fame for his memoirs. So, the Wood Sprite infuses the puppet with life-giving blue light, and Geppetto wakes up horrified to find that the alcohol-induced puppet he carved from the deepest pits of his grief and despair is alive and calling him Papa.
Geppetto and Sebastian are the first of the film’s repeating father figures who see their sons not as human beings with their own wants, wishes, and potential, but rather as tools, and vessels for their frustrated desires. Pinocchio, though connected to Carlo through unexplainably mystic soul ties, is nothing like Geppetto’s late first son. “What is it, what is it, what is it?” Pinocchio asks, lilting in dulcet tones while throwing carving knives and chamber pots around Gepetto’s house in pure, dangerous innocence. He scares the town with his unnatural existence, yells and begs for hot chocolate like a brat, and does the opposite of whatever Geppetto tells him to do. Pinocchio’s a bundle of contrasts; his curiosity and joy shakes Geppetto out of his complete despair, while his disobedience reawakens the stress of being responsible for another life, and reminds Geppetto of losing Carlo. The still-grieving Gepetto pressures Pinocchio to mimic Carlo’s deference. But in Mussolini’s Italy, where young boys are molded by the state into pawns of war, obedience makes Pinocchio more susceptible to the manipulative men who only see the wooden boy as a means to their selfish ends.
Podesta (Ron Perlman), a war-hungry government official, takes early interest in Pinocchio as a potential soldier. And Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), the shrewd but fading aristocratic circus ring-master, lures Pinocchio into performing war-time propaganda for children as a living puppet. Geppetto, Podesta, and Volpe, an unholy trinity of controlling fathers representing grief, power, and greed, respectively, play tug-of-war with the trusting Pinocchio throughout the story, and kill him repeatedly in the process.
In one of the more extreme changes in Del Toro’s adaptation, Pinocchio dies four times throughout the course of the story. His soul is sent to a blue-hued afterlife, where Death, the Wood Sprite’s sister/alter-ego, a moody Sphinx surrounded by the sands of time, defines the rules of his particular immortality. Each death summons a larger and larger hourglass, whose dripping sand Pinocchio has to wait for before he’s brought back to life. The circumstances of Pinnochio’s deaths reveal the different facets of fear that define the men responsible for him, which in turn reflect the different ways that a country steeped in fascism and war kills their sons. And for Pinocchio himself, death is an alternative to the fear that he’s a disappointment and a burden to the father he loves. If he can’t truly die, Pinocchio can gradually separate himself from attachment to others as time passes, and defend himself from the pain that comes from burdening his suffering father.
The pain of feeling like a burden to Geppetto causes Pinocchio to leave home and travel, where he encounters a pair of sons, whose struggles to connect with their own father figures reflects the sadness and fear that looms over Pinocchio’s relationship with Geppetto. Spazzatura (Cate Blanchett), the talented monkey puppeteer, is so hopeful for Count Volpe’s approval he suffers through physical beatings. And Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard), the human boy, suppresses his fear of war to mold himself into his father Podesta’s conception of an ideal soldier. Both Spazzatura and Candlewick are initially jealous of Pinocchio because of their fathers’ interest in him as a puppet they can perfectly control. But when Volpe’s and Podesta’s abuses conflict with Pinocchio’s morals, he defends his fellow sons, and gives them space to express their frustration and individuality.
In one of the film’s most haunting sequences, Pinocchio resurrects from death by bullet to find that he’s been kidnapped and conscripted into a military training camp for Italian youth. Pinocchio and Candlewick, first at odds, eventually bond over their fear when Candlewick breaks down in tears from Podesta calling him weak. Pinocchio is reminded of Geppetto, who called him a burden out of stress and anger. But he also recalls Sebastian’s observation that fear causes fathers to sometimes say things they later regret, and offers Candlewick comfort.
Dec 10, 2022 · The push and pull of the current feel real on-screen, as does the physical effort of Pinocchio lifting Geppetto — a stunning feat for stop-motion animation. In the end, Pinocchio dies.
Dec 9, 2022 · You feel the pain in Geppetto’s face as he trembles following the death of his son, and the pleasure in Pinocchio as he experiences the and sorrows of life. Moving light helped Passingham...
Oct 12, 2022 · The cricket is stodgy and stringent. He learns humility and fragility and fallibility from Pinocchio. Geppetto starts the movie saying, “It has to be perfect!” He wants everything to be just so.
Dec 19, 2022 · When the carving does come to life as Pinocchio, Geppetto cannot help but imagine he sees Carlo, the boy who was lost, in his wooden visage, which leads to Geppetto’s constantly...
