Del Toro's Pinocchio: What Are Stories?
Del Toro's Pinocchio (Netflix) is a major success in animation history. It's not only another screen adaptation of Collodi's tale but a greatly crafted movie about life and death.
🎶Where’d all the time go? It’s starting to flyyy🎶
If you’re reading this, 2023 is at the doors. Maybe you’re getting ready to party with your friends and stuff, or maybe you can’t wait to curl into bed at 9 P.M. Either way, you have to stop and read this now, I don’t make the rules.
This year, you received a total of six issues of the Crip 101 Newsletter, which is only the last form that the Crip 101 project has taken. I had started with a wee Instagram page where I uploaded bits of content that never really satisfied me, so I decided to move to this new chapter.
To be honest, I never would have thought that thirty people would subscribe. I mean, it’s a small number for an online project, but consider putting thirty people in your living room — it’s a lot! Thanks to each and every one of you: you make this possible.
For this last issue of 2022, I want to talk about one production: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix, 2022). I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I watched it: it’s fun, it’s beautiful, it’s perfectly crafted, but most importantly it tells you about the power of stories, and that there will never be enough passionate, enthusiastic, talented artists on the face of the Earth — ever. I would also like to tell you about the other Pinocchios: Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio of 2002 and Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio of 2019. They’re all Italian, but that’s not as out of focus as you might think, and I’ll tell you why later.
Hope you can begin the new year in your favourite way, and if not, don’t worry! Climate change is going to kill us all soon, anyway.
See you on the other side of the divider.
A strange amount of Italian Pinocchios: Benigni and Garrone.
Everybody knows that the timeless story of Pinocchio is set in Italy, but if you look closely enough you start to see how Italy has increasingly become more and more present in modern remakes of Collodi’s original tale.
For the sake of economization and time management, we will only focus on two Italian cinematic adaptations of Pinocchio: Roberto Benigni’s movie of 2002 and Matteo Garrone’s of 2019. Both movies are directed by Italian authors, but their overall identities are, paradoxically, both different and similar.
Both draw inspiration from Collodi’s original story and build the imagery of early-1900s Italy for an audience that is specifically Italian; at the same time, Garrone’s movie has a much more international scope than Benigni’s, and a much more “realistic” in his depiction of the Italian landscape, too. Differently from Garrone, whose imagery is much more related to him than anyone else, Benigni’s 2002 Pinocchio still borrows from a Fellinesque vision that keeps the story from touching the ground on which it is built. It revolves around a core that perceives itself as still alive, even if not. On the other hand, Garrone’s 2019 Pinocchio gives the audience the same amount of insane world- and character-building that is found in Collodi’s story, yet affirming once again his own more tangible vision.
What makes the two movies children of the same mother is the fact that they adhere to Collodi’s conservative (if not reactionary) original message. Both Benigni and Garrone decide to follow the route of a wooden boy that can only find happiness in becoming a real boy; to accomplish it, he has to oblige to societal standards of living, in the form of being a docile, obedient boy. Consequentially, every time he doesn’t behave he is punished, scolded and drawn back from his final goal: to become a loved son.
From Collodi to Garrone the main goal of Pinocchio (the story) is building a body that must change itself to earn other people’s love. The reason why the wooden child continuously repeats that he wants to become “a real boy” is that it’s the only way to be cherished. In the end, great happiness and fatherly fulfilment come at a price: Pinocchio must change his own nature and body.
This change of flesh is not found in Del Toro’s 2022 movie, in which Pinocchio never really becomes “a real boy”. In fact, for him, “to be a real boy” means giving up his immortality and sacrificing himself to save his family; another chance at life comes with the understanding that human mortality isn’t part of him and true happiness will only come after accepting his twisted, Frankenstein-like character.
But this is only one of the many changes that Del Toro decides to bring to the story.
Another interesting detail that is not found in the original Pinocchio is the time setting: the 2022 movie is set in Italy during WWII, giving the story the opportunity of looking at Italian society and political history from a brand-new point of view. The beautiful nostalgic imagery is not for its own sake anymore, nor it is a platform for giving the audience a vision of the author’s/director’s cinematography (not exclusively anyway); it is finally a magnifying glass over the greatest issues and doubt of the human experience.
By shifting the story forward and giving the wooden boy the opportunity to embrace his true being, Del Toro gives the audience space to reflect upon themes of personal growth, parental love, self-healing and the meaning of one’s life. All while taking a setting (mid-1900s Italy) and giving it a major role in the evolution of the story itself.
When Pinocchio decides to ditch school and go be a performer for the puppet master, Volpe, he does it because he doesn’t know where else to find love and appreciation and, being only a child, he sees it in the crashing of applause from the audience. Plus, he works to send money to his poor father, that has lost his name and reputation because of Pinocchio himself. Differently from Collodi, Benigni and Garrone, Del Toro’s Pinocchio isn’t ditching school because he is an ungrateful child that needs to behave — he does it because he doesn’t want to feel like a burden anymore.
Also, when he finds himself being trained for war, together with Candlewick and his Fascist father, Pinocchio can be none other than himself: he is so deeply human, differently from most of the people around him, that he is the sole reason why Candlewick can finally stand up to his father, who only wants to make them killing machines.
In the end, the great chase for love comes from the assertion of the wooden child’s true identity — even if by the action of other characters.
Guillermo del Toro: ridiculing dictatorship.
Another notable matter about Del Toro’s Pinocchio is the way the movie handles fascism and the depiction of Benito Mussolini.
Roughly in the middle of the story, Pinocchio finds himself in Sicily, ready to perform for the Italian dictator, whom Volpe is fairly obsessed with. After a series of events, the wooden boy decides to change his act: he mocks and ridicules the dictator, the fascist regime and the war with a single, simple, puerile song.
While the boy’s performance does not make his life any easier, nor makes the war any farther from him, it gives the audience the opportunity of looking straight at Benito Mussolini.
In Del Toro’s vision, the dictator is short, disproportionate and easily laughable. He walks like a goose, exposing his excessive chin and his sadly known sneer. He sits, talks and moves like a spoiled child that always gets what he wants — in fact, after Pinocchio’s performance, he orders his subordinate to kill the puppet, finally revealing to the bystanders (and Candlewick’s military father) that he cannot die. He will always return back to life, making him the perfect soldier.
But Pinocchio isn’t the only movie that manages to successfully ridicule a dictator, without removing a credible depiction of the horrors of oppression, violence and war.
Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit (2019) tells the story of a young German child with a peculiar imaginary friend: Adolf Hitler.
In the course of the story, the audience has the opportunity to see how easy it is for a child to believe the vile rules and precepts of a dictatorship, while also leaving space for growth, conflicting emotions and misled innocence inside the very same character (Jojo).
At the same time, the imaginary Adolf Hitler (played by Waititi himself) is fat, disproportionate, childish, stupid, impulsive and jealous. He wants to lead Jojo to believe that Jewish people are the enemy, they are monstrous and dangerous, and when the child starts to emancipate himself from the Nazi rhetoric he had been fed… he just throws a fit.
Getting back to Pinocchio, this specific depiction of dictatorship isn’t dismissable, especially because it happens in the retelling of an Italian story.
Italy has a weird (but historically explainable) tradition regarding its past. The avoidance of trauma processing has created a loop of denial and withholding that still survives and is even stronger than before. The way we have ignored our past is the one that has brought us Giorgia Meloni as Prime Minister, and a plethora of people in power (presidents, secretaries, senators) that continue to either say the most insane stuff about Salò, Mussolini and MSI (Movimento Sociale Italiano) or straight-forwardly act like they have never opened a history book ever.
To give the audience such a representation of Mussolini is a gift. It puts laughter in the mouth of the spectator while punching him right between the shoulders. Right after, it offers you a father on a journey to ask for forgiveness; then, a child longing for love.
Finally, the joy of living to the point of death.
“What happens, happens. And then we are gone”.
It’s very difficult to put a conclusion together, right now. After considering so many gorgeous, inspiring and enthralling details about Del Toro’s Pinocchio — what could one say more about it?
One could focus on the mastery of the animation, the talent of the stop motion artists that worked on the different characters' designs, movements and expressions. One could even ponder on the author’s decision… but why would we? That’s an investigation for another time and space, for other people.
Let’s focus on the power of stories.
In the previous issues, we often mentioned the importance of stories — engaging, designing, consuming them. After all, this whole project is based on the idea that to make a story is to make a possibility for the world to change. For better or worse.
Any kind of teacher or professor that wants to teach “the art of storytelling”, especially in the audiovisual realm, has to, at some point or another, give their students reading homework. I, for a change, had to read a lot of screenwriting and storytelling manuals when the time came, and one of them was Into The Woods: How Stories Work and Why We Tell Them by John Yorke.
Net of the fact that Western storytelling is not necessarily the best model to follow, even if universally recognised as the most featured and/or influential, one thing we can extract from this book in particular:
All of our storytelling theories have one thing in common, all revolve around one central idea: the incomplete is made complete; sense is made. it sounds simplistic to say that in ordering is at the root of storytelling, but ordering is absolutely about how we navigate the gap between our inner selves and the outer world. indeed, the “home” we have talked about throughout this book is our inner self and our journey into the woods is a journey to everything beyond. Our attempt to make sense of things encompasses the psychological process: how do we bring inner and outer into balance, how does subjective meet objective, how do we square want and need? How do we fit in? (Yorke, 2014)
The way in which Del Toro decided to push the story to other kinds of adjustments, changes and versions of themselves is the embodiment of the thing you just read: we put ourselves into stories and put stories into ourselves in a desperate attempt to make sense of the universe as we perceive it. It is part of being human.
To put Pinocchio in Fascist Italy, rather than the late 1800s, is to disobey (as said by Del Toro himself). To take away the iconic Mangiafuoco and replace him with a witty, spoiled puppet master and his weird-looking monkey (a grumpy, deformed, abused son) gives yet another possibility to the audience to see how fatherhood can be distorted — especially in comparison with Geppetto, who embarks on a dangerous journey to just ask for forgiveness and offer his fatherly love. It changes the story to change the audience.
And then death.
The movie ends with a great cinematographic statement about life and death: Pinocchio, having chosen to be true to himself, cannot die anymore, thus he is doomed to witness the passing of all his friends and family. And yet, he is free. He walks away from the tombs and just lives.
He can finally accept that with his immortality comes the responsibility of witnessing life and stories’ great miracle: their ending.
Speaking of endings — here we are! Thank you for supporting Crip 101 in 2022. Hope you will continue to read it in 2023.
Talk about it with your friends, and don’t forget to enjoy the stories you encounter every day.
See you next year ✨