Guillermo del Toro brings 'Pinocchio' to Life in First Trailer
Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson bring the infamous wooden boy to life once again in the first look for the upcoming film, Pinocchio. This stop-motion adaptation of the classic tale by Carlo Collodi will be premiering on Netflix during the holiday season.
Pinocchio is the story of a wood carver, Geppetto (David Bradley), who is grieving the loss of his son. In an attempt to process his grief, Geppetto builds a wooden marionette of a boy. One night, the marionette is magically brought to life and Geppetto is overjoyed to have a son again. Things aren’t always what they seem, though, as Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) turns out to be much more mischievous and disobedient than Geppetto’s late son.
Like the 1940 Walt Disney animated film of the same name, the 2022 Pinocchio will feature Cricket (Ewan McGregor) as narrator and spiritual guide to the wooden boy. McGregor is not the only exciting voice tied to this project. Pinocchio is a reunion of sorts for frequent del Toro collaborators. This marks Academy Award-winner Cate Blanchett’s second outing, Ron Perlman’s seventh, Tim Blake Nelson’s second, and Burn Gorman’s third. Rounding out the rest of the cast is Finn Wolfhard, John Turturro, Christoph Waltz, and Tilda Swinton. As of now, not all roles have been announced, so there is still an air of mystery surrounding the cast.
del Toro has teased that Pinocchio will be a significantly darker take on the story than previous adaptations. That should come as no surprise as del Toro has built his career out of monsters. The Shape of Water told the romance between a humanoid amphibian (Doug Jones) and a mute laboratory cleaner (Sally Hawkins). The film was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards and won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Production Design, and Best Original Score. While del Toro’s work often features grotesque fantastical monsters, it’s often the humans who commit the most heinous crimes.
Pinocchio won’t be del Toro’s first adaptation of a children’s fable, though it is his first foray into animated feature films. One of his most famous works, Pan's Labyrinth, blends fairy tales together to tell the story of the beginning of the Francoist period of dictatorship in Spain. The original story of Pinocchio was written in 1883, but del Toro’s film will take place in 1930s Fascist Italy. It stands to reason he will use what he learned from Pan’s Labyrinth to blend Pinocchio’s original themes to the social climate of Italy's descent into fascism.
For many years, it seemed like Pinocchio would never see the light of day. del Toro has expressed interest in adapting the story since as early as 2008 and has even gone so far as to describe it as his passion project. It was stuck in years of development hell mostly due to budget issues. It wasn’t until 2018 that the film finally made it off the ground with Netflix signing on to finance del Toro’s vision.