Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) Review
A couple days ago we got the Oscar nominations for the 2023 Oscars. One of the nominees and the front runner for Best Animated Feature is Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. I was finally able to watch it a couple days back, what did I think of it? Was it good? Let’s get started!
The Good:
With this movie you have to talk about the claymation, stop motion effects that they used. And wow, this movie was a masterpiece on that level. The movie looks gorgeous from beginning to end with the way Guillermo uses the stop motion. Of course I’ve seen stop motion films over the years, A Nightmare Before Christmas is one of my favorite animated movies of all time. And that movie looked really cool back in the early 90s. But what they can do with technology in the year 2022 and how they can use stop motion is something truly special. You can tell that this was a passion project for Mr. del Toro and he poured his heart and soul into this.
Speaking of that, this is a greatly directed film. Guiliermo del Toro’s career has been very interesting because he’s done a little bit of everything. He’s done action blockbusters like Blade II and Hellboy. He’s done Oscar films like Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Nightmare Alley. So he’s a very artful director that has a lot of credibility to his name. And he brings all of his weirdness and creature designs to the forefront and so this is a greatly directed movie. Honestly, I can’t really think of a time when an animated movie was directed as well as this one was. Not that there haven’t been greatly directed animated movies before but not on the level that this one is.
Another thing here is that from my research it sounds like this is a more faithful version of the classic story. Because the classic Disney story isn’t all that faithful to the actual fairy tale story. Guillermo del Toro decided to more closely adapt the classic version of the fairy tale. So it’s something different, to the best of my knowledge this version of Pinocchio hasn’t been translated into film form before. And I prefer this version of Pinocchio over the Disney version. The Disney version has a few more holes and gaps that don’t quite make sense. There’s some things at the core of its story that don't sit well. This movie has those, but I think they work better. Since it’s not played for fun for most of the film, it can get away with the darker elements more so then the Disney film could.
Another thing with this movie, the voice cast is stacked and great. Everybody from top to bottom is great and brings a lot to the role. Two of the standouts were Ewan McGregor and David Bradley. Ewan McGregor voices Sebastian J. Cricket and it’s just great. It’s great to see him do something like this, his voice just fits the cricket character really well. And since he’s such a great actor he can emote a lot of the right emotions in scenes. Also you have David Bradley as Geppetto, David Bradley was Filch in the Harry Potter movies. And with this role he’s one of the leads of the movie who just gets to act. He’s so good at being this broken father to Pinocchio that really cares about him but is kind of struggling with his life. And it’s just such a great performance from him that it shows he can act.
Finally, I thought this film did a great job of balancing its tone. Like I’ve said before, the movie can get very dark at times and it can be very emotional at other points. But it also finds time to be funny and have humor. The movie has a few recurring jokes through-out it that work. It’s not over played and the humor is played at just the right moments to add some levity into this dark and sometimes very emotional film.
The Bad:
While I praised the film for balancing the tone of everything going on. I still think it’s a bit too dark for my taste and I don’t know if that was a good thing or not. From the research I’ve been able to gather all of the stuff with Mussolini and the Nazi’s was added in by Guiliermo del Toro. And in those scenes and sequences, I get why Pinocchio was there and that it happened in the time period of this movie. But to me it felt like it was there just to be more shocking and darker. I get the idea that those scenes were trying to communicate, but I think there was a different way to go about it.
Also the movie is about 2 hours long and I thought it was a bit too long. Trim 10ish minutes from the movie, make it closer to 1 hour and 45 minutes and I think it’s better. It gets a bit tricky because I’m not sure what you’ll cut out from the movie. But I certainly do think some scenes could be trimmed to make it move a bit quicker.
Final Thoughts: Guiliermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a truly creative and unique film. It has Guiliermo del Toro’s love and passion displayed all around this movie. You get some truly gorgeous looking animation mixed with big emotions and darker elements. But it’s a really good new take on the classic Pinocchio story. That I would say is better than Disney live action remake we got last year. It’s not one of my favorites of the year, but it’s a very solid movie.
The Score: 8.7/10 (B+)
Comments