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.
