Post by Dracula on Dec 26, 2022 21:51:34 GMT -5
Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio(12/9/2022)
I must say, for whatever reason animation really hasn’t been doing it for me this year. Not even when it comes from otherwise strong voices in the medium like Pixar (Turning Red), Cartoon Saloon (My Father’s Dragon), or Henry Selick (Wendell & Wild). Not sure if that’s just a “me” problem or if it really has just been a weak year on that front, or maybe a combination of the two. For a while the film that looks like the best bet to break this streak has been Guillermo Del Toro’s latest film, a stop motion adaptation of Pinocchio, but while I did indeed admire a lot about the film I’m not sure even it got me truly excited, possibly because I’ve never had much use for Pinocchio as a story in any of its forms. Del Toro’s adaptation has most of the usual elements like a talking cricket, a blue fairy, and a whale sequence at the end but he moves the action of Carlo Collodi’s late 19th Century story and places the action in Italy during the fascist period and puts less of an emphasis on the title character becoming a flesh and blood human and more on questions of his mortality or lack thereof.
That’s not a bad idea for where to take this at all and it also fits within many of the director’s usual theme. In fact he’s made a plausible case that this finishes a trilogy started by The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth (much to the chagrin of Criterion, who have been pretending that Cronos has anything to do with those other movies for some reason), but I must say I didn’t like this nearly as much as those other films. Part of that is that I’m not sure I was entirely sold on the movie’s visual style. On a technical level the stop motion animation is solid, but not quite as detailed and articulated as what Laika has been doing recently. From a design perspective I think it’s more of a mixed bag. There are certainly some creatures and sets in this that are straight out of Del Toro’s imagination and are quite cool looking, but Del Toro has been so effective in the past of bringing similar designs to life in his live action films that I maybe expected him to be even more next level when unmoored from even the limitations of modern visual effects here and I’m not sure that really happened. I would also say that the design for Pinocchio himself never quite worked for me. This is actually one of the least human designs for the character we’ve ever gotten, making him look less like a puppet that would actually be put on a stage and more like a misshapen wood creation that Geppetto threw together in a moment of grief induced drunkenness. The resulting puppet looks a little odd to me, especially as he starts becoming a war asset they’re trying to exploit late in the film.
Oddly enough the movie is actually a full blown musical, but I’m not sure that was a smart move, firstly because the songs themselves are kind of mid and secondly because the movie sort of doesn’t commits to this and just quits bursting into song around the halfway point. I also thought the side characters like the cricket and the film’s villain were kind of questionable and also that the film’s voice cast including the kid they got to voice Pinocchio wasn’t top notch. In general the movie starts well and ends well but sags a bit in the middle, but I don’t want to come off too negative about it. Truth be told this is probably the best version of this story to date unless you want to count Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. It certainly blows Robert Zemeckis’ live action remake of the Disney version out of the water and for that matter it’s a clear improvement over the original Disney version, at least outside of that movie’s animation innovations, and let’s not even speak of Roberto Benigni’s misguided disaster of an adaptation. But fairy tales are generally not my thing and this is still basically a fairy tale and while it’s a darker version of one than you’re going to get out of Disney it’s still nothing close to the cool fusion of wonder and grit that Del Toro achieved with Pan’s Labyrinth.
*** out of Five
I must say, for whatever reason animation really hasn’t been doing it for me this year. Not even when it comes from otherwise strong voices in the medium like Pixar (Turning Red), Cartoon Saloon (My Father’s Dragon), or Henry Selick (Wendell & Wild). Not sure if that’s just a “me” problem or if it really has just been a weak year on that front, or maybe a combination of the two. For a while the film that looks like the best bet to break this streak has been Guillermo Del Toro’s latest film, a stop motion adaptation of Pinocchio, but while I did indeed admire a lot about the film I’m not sure even it got me truly excited, possibly because I’ve never had much use for Pinocchio as a story in any of its forms. Del Toro’s adaptation has most of the usual elements like a talking cricket, a blue fairy, and a whale sequence at the end but he moves the action of Carlo Collodi’s late 19th Century story and places the action in Italy during the fascist period and puts less of an emphasis on the title character becoming a flesh and blood human and more on questions of his mortality or lack thereof.
That’s not a bad idea for where to take this at all and it also fits within many of the director’s usual theme. In fact he’s made a plausible case that this finishes a trilogy started by The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth (much to the chagrin of Criterion, who have been pretending that Cronos has anything to do with those other movies for some reason), but I must say I didn’t like this nearly as much as those other films. Part of that is that I’m not sure I was entirely sold on the movie’s visual style. On a technical level the stop motion animation is solid, but not quite as detailed and articulated as what Laika has been doing recently. From a design perspective I think it’s more of a mixed bag. There are certainly some creatures and sets in this that are straight out of Del Toro’s imagination and are quite cool looking, but Del Toro has been so effective in the past of bringing similar designs to life in his live action films that I maybe expected him to be even more next level when unmoored from even the limitations of modern visual effects here and I’m not sure that really happened. I would also say that the design for Pinocchio himself never quite worked for me. This is actually one of the least human designs for the character we’ve ever gotten, making him look less like a puppet that would actually be put on a stage and more like a misshapen wood creation that Geppetto threw together in a moment of grief induced drunkenness. The resulting puppet looks a little odd to me, especially as he starts becoming a war asset they’re trying to exploit late in the film.
Oddly enough the movie is actually a full blown musical, but I’m not sure that was a smart move, firstly because the songs themselves are kind of mid and secondly because the movie sort of doesn’t commits to this and just quits bursting into song around the halfway point. I also thought the side characters like the cricket and the film’s villain were kind of questionable and also that the film’s voice cast including the kid they got to voice Pinocchio wasn’t top notch. In general the movie starts well and ends well but sags a bit in the middle, but I don’t want to come off too negative about it. Truth be told this is probably the best version of this story to date unless you want to count Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. It certainly blows Robert Zemeckis’ live action remake of the Disney version out of the water and for that matter it’s a clear improvement over the original Disney version, at least outside of that movie’s animation innovations, and let’s not even speak of Roberto Benigni’s misguided disaster of an adaptation. But fairy tales are generally not my thing and this is still basically a fairy tale and while it’s a darker version of one than you’re going to get out of Disney it’s still nothing close to the cool fusion of wonder and grit that Del Toro achieved with Pan’s Labyrinth.
*** out of Five
