‘Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio’ Review: The Fantasy Master’s Distinctive Stop-Motion Take on the Old Story Carves Out Its Own Way
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic The possessive claim in the title “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is a gutsy one. There’s confidence — some would even say arrogance — in filming an oft-told story at least as old as the hills, and suddenly branding it as your own: Even two auteurs as ballsy as Francis Ford Coppola and Baz Luhrmann didn’t slap their own names on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” respectively.
Still, you can hardly blame del Toro’s stop-motion spin on Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century chestnut “The Adventures of Pinocchio” for wanting to advertise its distinguishing vision up top: After umpteen tellings of the wooden-boy tale, and coming on the heels of Robert Zemeckis’ wretched Disney remake, Netflix’s rival adaptation has to announce itself as something different.
That it is; it’s often delightful too. There’s a reason why Collodi’s story keeps getting recycled, of course: It’s a great and unusual one, a moral-bearing Tuscan folk tale that transcends the tradition of its form with delirious surrealism and a perverse streak of wit.
So delirious and so perverse, in fact, that it’s rarely been very faithfully adapted, with Disney’s gentler 1940 interpretation — most notable for giving the original tale’s reckless, selfish title character a far more likable makeover — becoming canonical in many children’s imaginations.
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