Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022)

November 21, 2022 7:18 PM

A darker version of the classic children's fairy tale of a wooden puppet that transforms into a real living boy.

96% on Rotten Tomatoes

Currently in theaters, coming to Netflix on December 9th.

posted by cozenedindigo (4 comments total)

I liked this a lot. It's is an amazing production and is frequently brilliant, but it also falls squarely into the genre I've come to call "weaponized dad bullshit". Mothers are either unmentioned and absent or silent. It's all about fathers and sons, good and bad. Women are just not part of the equation here.

Loved the cricket. The afterlife sequences were incredible. The film is worth watching for those alone.
posted by phooky at 5:51 AM on December 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

This was a real work of art. It was about fathers and sons but it was also about the brevity of life, the value of disobedience, what love means, what sacrifice means. The stop motion was incredible.
posted by matcha action at 2:40 PM on December 28, 2022 [2 favorites]

Huh. Was not expecting this to be Surprise Reverse Pinocchio, where Geppetto is the one who has to learn the lesson.

Beautiful animation.
posted by kyrademon at 4:28 PM on March 22, 2023

I was expecting the movie to cover more of Pinocchio's many adventures from the book, so that was a disappointment, and I wasn't all that thrilled about the ending, because in the book Pinocchio becomes a real human boy who grows up rather than remaining a puppet who can only have limited experiences during his life span. And while the animation was wonderful on the whole, the figure of Pinocchio, despite possessing a joyous, chaotic energy that grew on me, gave me the creeps.

I did like that the movie took a complex view of obedience and disobedience, and of grief. And for me the best laugh in the whole movie was when Sebastian J. Cricket, who is trying to convince Pinocchio to remain in Geppetto's cottage as he's been told rather than follow him off to church, gets only three notes into what is clearly going to be a morally instructive song before Pinocchio flings the cottage door open and heads off to church, sweeping Sebastian aside and flattening him behind the door. I wish more preachy songs were forestalled in such a way in children's movies.
posted by orange swan at 7:17 AM on September 17, 2023