How Guillermo del Toro's stop-motion, anti-fascist 'Pinocchio' dramatically departs from Disney classic

Guillermo del Toro has wanted to make a Pinocchio movie for as long as he can remember. The Oscar-winning filmmaker thought he’d finally gotten his chance when he announced an adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s famed 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio in 2012. But then the Hellboy director watched that project fester in Development Hell for a full decade.

It wasn’t until 2018 that Del Toro struck a new deal with Netflix that his stop-motion animated film, now aptly titled Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, shifted into gear.

“The normal thing [for a movie project] is to not get made, which is tragic, but it’s true,” Del Toro, 58, says matter-of-factly in a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, where he is joined by co-director Mark Gustafson. “After 30 years [in the business] I’m used to the fact that some of the best projects, they don’t happen. Mark and I were in this journey for a long, long time, and many, many times we thought it was not gonna happen.”

Still, the wait was worth it, both for the audience (Pinocchio is scoring early rave reviews), and for the man affectionately known as GDT himself.

“This is the most collectively joyful creation experience I’ve ever had,” Del Toro says. “We started friends and ended up friends, all of us, and we didn't want it to end. And at the same time, we wanted it to end.”

That’s probably because production took over 1,000 days, Del Toro has said. It also took the efforts of thousands of collaborators to execute its complex animation. “We got to go out and get all of the best in stop motion, and design, and really do it the way we wanted to do it,” says Gustafson, who previously worked as the animation director on Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox.

And if you’ve seen any of Del Toro’s films — from Cronos to Pan’s Labyrinth to The Shape of Water to Nightmare Alley — it won’t be any surprise to learn his Pinocchio is a far darker, meditative, more surrealistic take on the material than that famous 1940 Disney animated classic.

Its setting is now World War I Italy, under the fascist control of Benito Mussolini. Geppetto’s human son Carlo is killed by a bomb strike, in a church steeple, no less, and in his debilitating grief, Geppetto crafts the wooden boy called Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) — who at certain points is killed himself, and ventures back and forth to the afterlife. There are heavy elements and themes: mortality, nationalism, exploitation, loyalty, life, death, war.

“It’s a very, very different take on this material,” Del Toro says.

“We knew we were gonna put our own unique point of view on it, or there's no real reason to do it,” adds Gustafson. “Guillermo and [co-writer Patrick McHale] really had a very interesting take on it, which completely flipped the original notion of the Collodi book on its ear, which [looked at] the virtue of disobedience or questioning authority, which is sort of the opposite of what the the book is about. And that made it really interesting and a reason to tell this story again.”

Explains Finn Wolfhard (Stranger Things, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), who voices Candlewick, the son of a fascist official who becomes an unlikely ally of the wooden boy: “It follows the same kind of story beats that you know from the old Pinocchio, but I think it really tells a different story. The central themes are the same, about acceptance and fatherhood, but I feel like this movie drills a lot deeper into human connection and emotion and delves deeper into the human condition.”

It’s also markedly different from the last Pinocchio movie released, which — in one of those bizarre Hollywood coincidences — came only three months ago with Robert Zemeckis’s critically maligned live-action version released on Disney+.

Del Toro and Gustafson admit they didn’t see that one.

“You’re aware of it, and there’s no way you can be objective about it, so you don't seek it,” del Toro says, “But I think that Pinocchio can be remade another 10 times, and depending on the conviction of the person doing it, it is a very viable symbol.”

And while Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is rated PG, it’d be a real stretch to call it a kids movie.

“Kids can watch it, absolutely, but I don’t think Guillermo made this for kids,” says Wolfhard.

“It’s a movie that kids can watch, but it’s not a movie for kids,” agrees Mann, who voices Pinocchio, and was only nine years old when he was cast. “It’s a movie for everyone.”

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is now streaming on Netflix.

Watch the trailer: