Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Movie: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Nominated for: Best Animated Feature

How I watched: Netflix

When I fell asleep: I wish

When it had me: Italy

When it lost me: too many pinocchios!

What systems does it challenge: Fascism

I am so tired of watching Pinocchio movies. There have been at least 24 film versions made and three of them were released in 2022! There was one made in 2019 and it feels like I just watched it last year. I swear that supply is higher than demand, at least in my household.

What's the same this time? Pinocchio is annoying! He's always naive and carefree in the most dangerous and self-centered manner and spends the majority of the film making the absolute worst decisions. He gets warned about consequences and ignores them over and over again and then fixes it in the last ten minutes. I understand that this is analogous to children and their process of learning their place in the world or growing a superego to balance out their id, but at this point I just seethe at Pinocchio because I've seen this story so many times! How has he not learned yet???

What's different this time? Del Toro's story takes some departures from what you've seen before and links the story to the fascism in Italy during WWII. This gave it some depth (and sadly, relevance) and made it more interesting that a simple re-telling of the Disney movie. The naivete of the main character almost serves as a shield against the virus of fascism. If someone hasn't bought into any systems yet, then I suppose, they are less susceptible to falling in line with peer pressure and political manipulation. Maybe Del Toro is telling us that children will save us from fascism. I'm raising some of Gen Z and I admit to clinging to that hope with him.

In other news Cate Blanchett pulls an Alan Tudyk and voices a monkey that only communicates in grunts, growls and whimpers. So that's something.

Some of the rules set up by this version felt shaky and the movie even ends on a question. Rather than feeling like a whimsical open ending that allows you to decide something for yourself, it felt like the story teller gave up. It was like, "Well, our story ends here, we never decided where this was going." Kind of a weak way to go out if you ask me, but I'm not a fan of ambiguous endings in general.