Guillermo del Toro's stop-action version of Pinocchio is clearly a labor of love and it looks great. The stop-motion animation is almost too flawlessly executed -- the animated figures move with absolute realism and they are posed against spectacular backgrounds. (I like the more halting herky-jerky stop-motion that reveals itself as a conjuror's trick, not this completely smooth and perfectly executed simulacram of real motion.) The film's story is rather tediously developed but the plot makes sense and has a clearly defined narrative arc. But the movie is completely unengaging: it has the mysterious effect of being brilliantly made and, yet, almost totally uninteresting. How has del Toro and his co-director, Mark Gustafson achieved this curious effect? The answer, I think, lies in the very visual inventiveness that characterizes the movie. Del Toro, of course, is a famous horror film director and his roots lie in the Mexican baroque and grotesque. As a result, all of the figures in the movie are monstrous, fantastic beings that are more akin to elaborate chitinous insects than human beings or mammals; the viewer has no one or thing with which to identify. It's hard to develop any empathy with characters that are conceived, more or less, an inexpressive arachnids. The best example of del Toro's destructive over-imagining of these figures is the film's narrator, Sebastian J. Cricket. (Presumably, the "J" stands for "Jiminy".) In the Disney version of this story, the cricket is a cute and comical side-kick for the wooden puppet-boy. In del Toro's version, the cricket isn't cute and, in fact, is horrific -- a black roach-like figure with staring white screens for eyes. The thing doesn't look like a cricket and, certainly, isn't endearing. Rather, the character is a monster, like all the other figures in the movie. You can't warm to this glaring robotic-like bug and the same defect applies to Pinocchio himself. In del Toro's conception, Geppetto has hewn the puppet out of a block of wood in a drunken and grief-stricken rage. The wooden boy is raw-looking splintery figure missing one ear that moves like a crippled spider. The creature has tiny immobile eyes and a schematic face that is both scary and tragic. But Pinocchio isn't built to express anything like an emotion -- he's gruesome-looking wooden effigy that prances around but can't smile or wink or show any trace of human feeling. Accordingly, this monster's appearance dissuades the audience from any investment in the notion that the creature wants to be a "real boy" -- how would this be possible since Pinocchio doesn't even remotely resemble a human being? This defect (or better put, perverse design) is evident in all of the monsters inhabiting this film. Geppetto and his adversary, Count Volpe, look like carved wooden mannequins -- they are beautifully designed but inexpressive. Volpe's horribly abused sidekick, an organ-grinder's monkey with an emaciated torso and mutilated eye, is similarly hideous and scary-looking. Volpe has upswept wings of hair carved into stiff horns and, also, is monstrous. Every creature in the film is gruesome or disgusting. Periodically, Pinocchio dies and, before being resurrected, is carried by ebony pallbearer rabbits who make the monstrous hare in Donnie Darko look cute and cuddly -- they are skeletal with mask-like heads and either lug black caskets about or play cards, loudly insulting one another. The pallbearer rabbits are supposed to be amusing, but they're just scary. The card games are designed to have a sort of grim Bowery boys conviviality -- but it doesn't work because of their terrifying appearance. Similarly, the whale that swallow Geppetto is battleship-like submarine with a fearsome frowning brow -- the thing is modeled on the form of the dolphins that lurk around the corners of Baroque maps. The inside of the creature, where Geppetto has to spend half of the film, is a nasty cavern full of bile and mucous waterfalls. The creature's blowhole, through which the prisoners escape, is a pulsing, slimy red sphincter. Pinocchio is brought to life by a bizarre angel that seems to be a cross between a praying mantis and a skeletal girl. In the kingdom of death to which Pinocchio periodically reverts, there is a crouching sphinx, a chimera comprised of all sorts of creatures, including insects and serpents -- this monster, like her sister, the life-bestowing angel has blank eyes like TV screens tuned to no channel at all, a froth of white static in the middle of the monster's face.
Del Toro's movie is set during the Fascist era in Italy. (The picture bears a close resemblance to the director's Pan's Labyrinth, a movie that critics loved but that I thought was overwrought to the point of delirium and too brutally sad to be entertaining.) Geppetto loses his rather cloying and sentimentally conceived human son, Carlo, in a bombing raid -- a bomb lands on the poor kid while he is working with his father to install a gruesome bleeding Christ on a cross. (We see Geppetto calling for more blood to smear on the wooden figure's head and torso -- this is a profoundly Mexican image in the film.) Geppetto plants a pine tree next to his dead son's grave and becomes an embittered drunk. Years pass and the pine grows to be an estimable tree and, then, in a drunken spasm of rage, Geppetto cuts down the memorial pine and, while completely intoxicated, hacks the thing into a vague effigy of a boy. Falling asleep on a bed of broken whiskey bottles, Geppetto awakes to find that a monster-angel has turned the ill-made wooden puppet into a living being. Geppetto doesn't much like the monster he has inadvertently made and it doesn't seem remotely human to him. The monster is abducted by the vicious and abusive Count Volpe with his mutilated monkey. Pinocchio sings and dances his way across Italy -- the film starts in the Alps and ends up in Catania in Sicily. There he puts on a show for Mussolini in which insults Il Duce with the result that he is shot dead and has to be resurrected. The puppet then ends up with Podesta, a haggard black shirt fascist who specializes in training little boys to be warrior-killers -- there's some gruesome violence when Podesta pits his own son against the wooden monster in a war game, staged for some reason, in a bronze castle. Pinocchio escapes Podesta only to be kidnaped again by Volpe. Volpe ends up trying to burn Pinocchio at the stake but the puppet escapes, rescues Geppetto from the belly of the whale, however, at the cost of his life -- he's blown to splinters by a floating sea-mine. (The world is at war again.) The sphinx of death says that if Pinocchio choses to become a real boy, he will be mortal and have to die. (This is like the "little mermaid" in Hans Christian Andersen's story who gives up 300 years of joy in the sea to become a mortal human who will, nonetheless, revert to sea-foam at the end of the story -- that is, before Andersen cheats to contrive an implausible happy ending.) Pinocchio choses mortality over remaining a puppet forever -- but this doesn't improve his appearance and he remains a rudely whittled and hacked hunk of wood. But the plot here loses it's way. Rather than dying, poor Pinocchio lives a long time -- outliving poor, mourning Geppetto and, even, the cricket. (He puts the dead cricket in a matchbox and carries it around with him in a cubby-hole in his wooden chest.) The story is narrated by the authorial cricket which begs the question of who is telling the tale after the insect dies. Like the wandering Jew or Cain, Pinocchio trudges through the fallen world, alone and, apparently, unable to die. The moral of the story is stated: "What happens happens and, then, we are gone" -- it sounds like a Mexican proverb. This grim and brutal stuff is accompanied by maudlin, cloying songs that sound like they were rejected from the most recent Disney movie. I have no idea what the filmmakers were thinking when they made this picture: it's far too grim and gloomy for children (Geppetto makes Pinocchio in a drunken fit) and, yet, adults aren't likely to warm to this melancholy either. The movie is brilliantly designed but, fundamentally, depressing and, sorry to say, boring.
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