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In this video, I discuss the evolution of the story of Pinocchio, focusing mainly on the novel written by Carlo Collodi and the fantastic reimagining co-written and co-directed by Guillermo del Toro.
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Sources:
The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), translated and annotated by John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna
An Essay on Pinocchio – Nicolas J. Perella
https://www.jstor.org/stable/479125
Italy in the Age of Pinocchio – Carl Ipsen
Death and Rebirth in Pinocchio – Thomas J. Morrissey & Richard Wunderlich
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/246063/pdf
Guillermo del Toro was an animator — until a pooping burglar derailed him | Polygon
https://www.polygon.com/23502146/guillermo-del-toro-pinocchio-animation-interview
Guillermo del Toro says making his ‘Pinocchio’ was healing | Public Radio East
https://www.publicradioeast.org/2022-12-10/guillermo-del-toro-says-making-his-pinocchio-was-healing
Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio Reconceptualizes What it Means to be a “Real Boy” | IGN
https://www.ign.com/articles/guillermo-del-toros-pinocchio-reconceptualizes-what-it-means-to-be-a-real-boy
0:00 Intro
3:00 The First Pinocchio
10:10 The Many Film Adaptations
14:30 GDT: stop-motion
16:50 GDT: the story
20:20 GDT: obedience
26:42 GDT: a real boy
31:02 GDT: death and rebirth
37 Comments
Happy new year! I start talking about Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio at the 14:30 mark if that’s your main interest. As always, thanks for watching 🙂
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Del Toro made the best version of Pinocchio. I was in tears when the movie ended.
Also, the Cricket is the best character.
I loved this adaptation of Pinocchio because I feel like Del Toro was able to walk that fine line between Pinocchio’s sense of wonder and the fact that he’s a mischievous little shit. Most of the time, he’s depicted as just an ignorant brat which always felt too 1D for me…😅
I saw this movie 2 weeks ago and it’s still burned into my mind. It’s so beautiful and dark and yet funny and whimsical. Nobody does it like GDT
This was a beautiful and well researched essay. Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and the various perspectives on the story. It’s 💞💕💞 lovely and heart wrenching
I think you have this very wrong. Pinocchio is just there for the ride in his own movie. Look at how much agency he has, and the choices he makes in the Disney movie vs this one where decisions are made for him.
Pinocchio is a childhood fave the 40s version and GDT retelling.
Del Toro's my favourite and I cried a bit at the beginning and even more at the ending which I'm not exaggerating and every time I see that ending I just can't help but cry at how emotional and beautiful it is and there are moments and scenes that I felt a bit that I relate on a personal level
this movie is a beauty of animation especially in the art of Stop Motion
funnily enough GDT's Pinocchio is also produced by The Jim Henson Company and making it their second time the've done work on a Pinocchio adaptation. guess Pinocchio and The Jim Henson Company where two things that strangely go to together since they are both related to puppets
You should see the 2019 version
Hey there! Great video! I can tell it took a lot of research. I'll definitely be watching the film myself. I have to acknowledge I can relate to feeling like I wasn't good enough for my father.
This is the best review, by far
I love the amount of insane research and love put in these videos the channel has easily become one of my favorites on youtube
Background music please? What are they from?
💗
"Children, after all, look forward to adulthood as the Promised Land, whereas adults look back to childhood as the lost Eden."
That one actually stings. At 22, I've found that my freedom has been severely limited, as opposed to when I was 10. As juvenile as this thought may be, I feel I've been raised to become yet another cog in the machine that is "polite" society. However, there's little good that comes from moments of halcyon.
Great video I also grew up with the old live-action Pinocchio. The part that really got me is when Gepetto made a replica of Pinocchio with stuff he found in the stomach of the whale quietly saying: "coming through" after searching for Pinocchio for so long. That pulled a lot of heartstrings. I think it's the reason why I loved GDT Pinocchio so much as it leaned into the darker subject matter of the tale.
Also as a side note, what music did you use for the background? I really like it
Omgg 1:04 you literally unlocked a memory for me I forgot that fever dream existed!
Not might be, It IS the best version.
Comparing it to other Fairy Tales, Pinocchio is like Little Mermaid in the sense it's about earning a human soul through good behavior. Kind of like Ugly Duckling and Hunchback of Notre Dame as far as themes of learning to recognize one’s own beauty/cultivate social awareness, and a journey of self-respect.
As far as Fairy Tale tropes of being granted a boon by a magical being, Pinocchio stands out weird. Geppetto wanted a son, and the Blue Fairy gave him one because he was a good man. Except she didn’t, her granted boon had a catch. He didn’t have a son, he effectively had a curse to dispel, teach a horrible child good manners (kind of making it like Lilo & Stitch in that sense). Why would Blue Fairy do that, a boon with a catch like that? Maybe it wasn’t so much a backhanded reward as he was just uniquely qualified to accomplish the dispel conditions and she was just killing two birds with one stone.
Also, knowing the way magic like that tends to work, counter-intuitively Pinocchio probably couldn’t have become flesh and blood without the catalyst of the jackass curse to recognize him as an organic being. An important aspect of the story is that he never makes up for his misdeeds, or at least not his original sin, he just has to bury his shame and own up to his mistake, asking forgiveness. Because misdeeds can’t always be undone, you just have to move past the fact that they happened.
Anyway, the point of pleasure island was to be debaucherous temptation renouncing adult responsibility, right? But in my experience, that's not really what kids want. The issue isn't that kids don't want to be adults, the issue is that adults don't respect them as independent beings and try to conscript them into the illusion of what they think adult life is supposed to be. Being a kid is about learning what freedoms adults keep from you, being an adult is about learning what freedoms you simply don't have (but not necessarily in a bad way). What if pleasure island instead baited being taken seriously by adults by giving them power and influence? Or what if instead of becoming donkeys they just became blah from overexposure, became cursed from diminishing returns on shallow indulgence?
I first read a translation of Pinocchio when I was ~11. I understood for the first time that his name translated to "eyes of pine" and that part of Pinocchio's problem was that he literally saw the world through different eyes.
The pinocchio I'm most familiar with is AI Artificial Intelligence (2001)
At first I thought Lindsay Ellis was narrating.
A proper Pinocchio story would have the wooden boy murder the cricket right off the bat and then be haunted by the “ghost” of said dead cricket which is really only a figment of his imagination because of his guilty conscience.
Me less than 2 minutes into the video happily shocked at the perfect pronunciation of Guillermo del Toro:D
Anyways great video:^)
did anyone else cry as much as I did, idk why but I feel like since I'm so young (17) , I am scared of living a life without my parents as I still rely on them for so much, it hurt seeing and just being hit with the reality that they're not going to live forever. It made me emotional even writing this comment lol
This should be on the big screen. Not enough non CGI films ever see the cinema anymore.
I still prefer the Matteo Garrone version. I like how close to the book it is, I like the acting, and I think it has a more interesting tone.
Such a beautifully put together video analysis of such an immensely meaningful fairytale ❤. I really enjoyed it very much and many of the versions of Pinocchio you’ve mentioned I’ve already seen, some as recently as a few months ago. There’s also one version that I remember from an old show from the 80s called FairyTale Theater theater with Paul Reubens playing Pinocchio as well 👍.
They let Pinocchio live, so that they can enjoy their lives, make Pinocchio witness the death of his family and live alone for almost eternity
I also grew up with that version 😅😅😅
I felt your comment about the film being dark by uncynical was spot on. That’s one of the things I love about del Toro films (amongst many, many wonderful aspects) is that they are dark without being cynical. Like you said, the darkness isn’t there to be gritty or for the sake of it – it’s there because it’s right to be there, and it’s done in a very beautiful and profound way. I just love del toro films! 😆
Consider how fortunate we are to still have creators like del Toro who create art because they really have something they want to say and share, rather than solely to have a box-office smash, and how unfortunate it is for those type of artists that the culture they create for rarely make their efforts box-office hits.
This movie made me cry when he lost his son. Haha I had no idea that was coming 😅
I acknowledge his point about transformation, but I think he might have a slight case of adult eyes in this particular case.
Love isn't about transformation, but childhood is. Childhood is a series of violent mutations, particularly the one that happens at Pinocchio's coded-age (as opposed to literal age). You literally grow a whole new brain at some point between age four and seven, and most people lose their entire life's worth of memories in less than a month and start over, it's that drastic a change. (If you've ever had the disconcerting experience of knowing a toddler, growing a little distant when they start school and suddenly one day they act like they've never seen you before even though you saw them almost daily for most their life, that's why.)
If any story justifies that kind of metaphor, it's Pinocchio, though if I was to write it myself it'd probably be more animal and less automaton, though it makes sense he chose it at the time. They thought children were empty vessels to be molded, we know now they've got a bit too much inherent personality for it to be that simple. I'd probably frame it like a reverse Where The Wild Things Are. Good hearted but instinctive monsters learning impulse control and empathy until one day becoming something entirely new and Human. There are ways to frame that that aren't about being socially acceptable, and more about the ability to choose for oneself what kind of person you grow into and meeting one's parent in their own humanity as a peer instead of as powerful and eldrich a creature as the Blue Fairy is.
Heh. Maybe the Blue Fairy should end the story human too, not because parents ever change but because our perception of them sure does.
Wait yet I heard it was terrible?? Hmm gonna have to watch it myself
Del Toro's Pinocchio is it for me. Its so touching on grief and loss and love. Mixed with fascism. I feel the Mexican culture too. Every frame in the feature has Del Toro's touch. Its a masterpiece.