Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson depart from Collodi structurally, not decoratively: this Pinocchio cannot stay dead. Every death drops him in a waiting room, and the longer he waits the more he misses outside. Deathlessness is a bill, not a gift. Fascism is not backdrop: the voice telling the puppet to be good also sends him to a military youth camp. Del Toro announced it in 2008, said at the end of 2017 that no studio would finance it, and Netflix took it over in 2018. Shooting opened at ShadowMachine’s Portland studio in early 2020 and ran to summer 2022, while the afterlife sequences and credits were animated at El Taller de Chucho in Guadalajara. Pinocchio’s head was colour printed plastic, the back of his body metal printed and the front printed plastic, then painted. Puppet department head Georgina Hayns says a character’s first puppet takes 6 to 12 months to reach the stage. It won the Oscar for animated feature, awarded to del Toro, Gustafson, Gary Ungar and Alex Bulkley. A good fit if you can take a child killed by a bomb on a church in the opening and death kept in plain view after. Not for anyone expecting a musical where songs stop the scene; the numbers here are short and wedged in.