BFI London Film Festival premiere; Metascore 92

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” opens in U.S. theaters in November before premiering globally Dec. 9 on Netflix.

Review: Bold, Dark and Funny Reimagining Dances to Its Own Tune
https://www.thewrap.com/guillermo-del-toros-pinocchio-review-2022-netflix/

However much he has borrowed from Disney, as well as from Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, his film (co-directed by Mark Gustafson) is obviously carved from the same pine tree as “The Devil’s Backbone,” “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape Of Water”: a dark but sweet horror fantasy about death, grief, and a misunderstood monster being persecuted by authoritarian forces.

Just take the opening minutes. Like Zemeckis, del Toro runs with the idea (which isn’t in the novel) that Pinocchio is a replacement for Geppetto’s dead flesh-and-blood son. The difference is that del Toro’s film includes an idyllic sequence in which the happy carpenter and his 10-year-old boy relish life in their beautifully realized Tuscan mountain village during World War I — and then little Carlo (named after the novel’s author) is blown up by a bomb while he’s in a church, gazing up at a crucifix. That definitely didn’t happen in the Disney cartoon.

The reimagining of Pinocchio’s birth is almost as radical. By this time, it’s the 1930s, and the town’s walls are plastered with Mussolini posters. Geppetto (voiced with gruff warmth by David Bradley) is a grief-crazed drunk. One dark night, he nails together a crude, one-eared mannequin, while thunder crashes and lightning fills his workshop with Expressionist shadows. His creation is brought to life by a blue fairy (Tilda Swinton) with a tail, four wings, and blinking eyeballs all over her body except where eyeballs should be.

Sounds great.