Full of spectral underworld creatures, fascist youth camps and wooden puppets burned at the stake, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio – as the Oscar-winning Mexican filmmaker's latest is officially billed – certainly lives up to its name. It's a handsomely crafted, stop-motion animated take on Carlo Collodi's 19th-century picaresque, marking a distinct, ostensibly dark departure from the Disney version that has long dominated the public imagination.
Returning to the battleground of folklore and fascism that powered his great Pan's Labyrinth, del Toro sets his adventure in Mussolini's Italy of the 30s, where the old woodcarver Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley, perhaps best known for playing Filch in the Harry Potter films) is grieving the son he lost back when a stray bomb decimated the local church in World War I. (The maudlin dead-son backstory, a textbook example of modern screenwriting's need to over-explain everything, was also a mistake made by Robert Zemeckis's flavourless Disney remake earlier this year.)
In a fit of grief and drunkenness, Geppetto chisels a replacement boy out of a tree trunk, and the newly rough-hewn marionette (newcomer Gregory Mann) is brought to life – in a signature del Toro moment – by a benevolent forest spirit who resembles Disney's Blue Fairy if she'd been reconfigured as a dazzling, Tilda Swinton-voiced angel of light.
"Little wooden boy," she purrs with a processed electronic echo, fingertips luminous like cosmic glowsticks, "may you rise with the sun and walk the earth."
To their credit, del Toro and co-writer Patrick McHale (Adventure Time) have restored much of Pinocchio's original insolence, a feature of Collodi's characterisation that saw the puppet cruelly splatter the Talking Cricket and generally behave like an insufferable brat across the novel's episodic, seemingly random narrative.
In the new film, Pinocchio represents a mischievous threat to the establishment: The churchgoing folk see him as a devilish aberration of the natural order, while the village's fascist enforcers accuse the string-free puppet of being a "dissident and independent thinker".
"Who controls you, wooden boy?" sneers the fascist Podestà (del Toro fave Ron Perlman), perplexed over Pinocchio's apparent allegiance only to chaos.
"Who controls you?!" cracks the fibbing puppet with the nose that grows.
The fascist presence adds a ripple to the themes of responsibility that run through Collodi's moralising, sometimes didactic writing, suggesting that not all authority is there to be obeyed – and not all elders should be automatically trusted.
It has the very del Toro effect of generating sympathy for the fable's traditional gallery of monsters, human and otherwise, including carnival proprietor Count Volpe (a perfectly cast Christoph Waltz) and his mangy gremlin monkey Spazzatura – voiced, in little more than a series of grunts and squawks, by none other than frontrunning Oscar thespian Cate Blanchett – two troubled outsiders who swindle Pinocchio into working in their travelling puppet show.
These showbiz sequences – which include, as every children's movie invariably must, a duet with a dancing turd – serve as a wonderful showcase for the film's jerky, tactile stop-motion work, shepherded by the Jim Henson Company and co-directed by veteran animator Mark Gustafson, whose credits stretch from claymation work for cult classic Return to Oz to directing the memorable animation on Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox.
Even that most annoying of Disney's embellishments, gasbagging do-gooder Jiminy Cricket, gets a soulful stop-motion makeover in the film's spindly, moustachioed narrator Sebastian J. Cricket (a velvety Ewan McGregor), whose presence provides a welcome running gag that nods to his violent end in the novel.
It all feels like a return to vintage form for del Toro, after the unwatchable dirge that was last year's Nightmare Alley and the corny prestige bait of his Best Picture-winning The Shape of Water, reconnecting him with the fantasy instincts that last flowered in Hellboy II: The Golden Army – whose Angel of Death would fit right in among the phantasms of Pinocchio's nether world.
That's no surprise, considering Pinocchio is a project the filmmaker has been circling in various forms since 2008; it's a text close to his heart, and on screen, a vessel into which he has poured so many of his signature obsessions.
Among the film's freaks and fascists and duelling father figures, del Toro's most rewarding tweak might be his addition of a plot in which Pinocchio returns time and again to the afterlife; here, he meets the figure of Death (also Swinton), a griffin-like trickster who moves with the eerie grace of a Ray Harryhausen monster, employs a clan of rabbit ferrymen to rival David Lynch, and tangles with the ersatz boy for his mortal soul – a thread that eventually evokes that greatest of all Pinocchio movie riffs, the immortal android son of Steven Spielberg's A.I..
Still, del Toro has a tendency to pile on so many elements – repeat excursions into fascist militarism smother the whimsy in the film's back half – that he runs the risk of diluting both the purity of the story and the power of its message (a temptation in adapting a novel that has long lent itself to a variety of interpretations).
And for all its supposed 'darkness', its gnarly critters and glimpses into the ugly realms of human nature, there isn't a single moment in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio as sinister and disquieting as the boy-napping, donkey-morphing trip to Pleasure Island in Disney's 1940 feature – proof, as ever, that the most terrifying images can usually be found in the most family-friendly of entertainment.
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is on Netflix from December 9.
