In Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, which began streaming on Netflix today, Gepetto is not a kindly old Italian man played by Hollywood’s favorite kind old man actor (like Tom Hanks in the recent Disney live-action remake from Robert Zemeckis). He’s a cantankerous old drunk, mourning the devastating loss of his child. And though there’s plenty of magic, there’s no “happy” ending in which Pinocchio is magically transformed into a human boy.
“Geppetto turns into a real father, as opposed to Pinocchio turning into a real boy,” del Toro explained to Decider in a recent Zoom interview.
The Academy Award-winning director, who is known for his dark, weird, and beautiful monstrosities in movies like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, turned one of his favorite stories as a child into a meticulously crafted stop-motion masterpiece. Using hundreds of puppets with movable silicone skin, del Toro and his small army of animators and puppeteers shot simultaneously on 60 stages, 60 cameras, and 60 sets. The design of Pinocchio himself dons none of the bright, primary-colored, hat-and-suspender-shorts look that the 1940 Disney film made ubiquitous. Instead, del Toro was inspired by a 2002 edition of Carlo Collodi’s original 1883 novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio, which featured illustrations from award-winning artist Gris Grimly, depicting the puppet as spindly and rough-around-the-edges, with unpainted, natural wood grain.
“In a few gestures, Gris captured the elemental nature of the character as I’d never seen before,” del Toro said in an interview for the film’s press notes. From there, del Toro (along with his co-director Mark Gustafson and co-writer Patrick McHale) spun a magical but distinctly un-Disney-like tale of parenthood, grief, life, death, and war. The filmmaker spoke to Decider about the film’s depiction of parenthood, his hopes for a Best Picture nomination, and why he has no interest in the new trend of AI art.
Decider: Disney’s Pinocchio movies have always shown Geppetto as the nicest old Italian man in the world. But your Geppetto has an edge—his grief is ugly and he drinks. Tell me about that choice.
Guillermo Del Toro: There’s a moment in which the cricket says, “I thought about imperfect fathers and imperfect sons.” I think the movie thinks about that. No human is perfect, nor should a human be perfect. And to love imperfection is a path to almost grace. Geppetto learns to love Pinocchio with everything that he considers to be imperfections. Geppetto turns into a real father, as opposed to Pinocchio turning into a real boy. That journey needs for him to start at a very, very dark place, which is his drinking. He has self-hatred, he has guilt, he is irascible. He can’t take a kid that asks questions every two seconds, you know? He prays for a miracle. And then when he gets the miracle, he doesn’t recognize it as a miracle, because he has imagined a perfect son in the kid that he lost. But I think it was necessary for that journey to be valid. To start at a place where Geppetto is no saintly character.
You’ve said that you always knew Pinocchio would not turn into a human boy by the end of the movie. Why was that important to you, to have that ending?
I remember seeing a drawing by Gris Grimly early on when we started talking about this in 2003 or so, in which Pinocchio is looking at himself in a mirror, and the reflection in the mirror is a real boy, but he hasn’t changed. And I thought, “That’s the ending.” Why should you change? If somebody tells you they love you, and the same person tells you they want you to change, they don’t love you. And that’s the end of the discussion: Love them or leave them be. If you are a father and a son, that relationship can grow really, really tense because many times parents think that they are here to educate and teach the kids. In reality, kids are here to save their parents and to teach them a little bit of grace. A child is born perfect. And it is the inkwell and the stains that you put in are the ones that then you later magnify, and are thrown back at you in the form of questioning and disobedience, which is necessary. That was the thing, not only at a familial level, but at a social level—disobedience in the film is a virtue.
On a lighter note, you’ve got some fun Easter eggs in this movie for Guillermo del Toro fans, references to your previous films. Is there one that you’re particularly proud of or hoping that audiences will notice?
It’s not so much Easter eggs as it is that I think that if you watch Pan’s Labyrinth, Devil’s Backbone, and Pinocchio, you will see how they are three siblings of the same type of story. There are Easter eggs that were put in there. In the stained glass windows in the church, there is the Faun, there is the Pale Man, and there is the bomb from Devil’s Backbone. A sequence that chronicles the falling of a bomb is a quote to Devil’s Backbone. The conversation between two kids in a long corridor full of beds reminds of Devil’s Backbone. There are gestures that the fascist officer [in Pinocchio] has that are identical to the captain in Pan’s Labyrinth. And so on and so forth. It’s full of those things.
Animated films tend to be relegated to the animation category at award shows like the Oscars, but you’re hoping Pinocchio will be nominated for Best Picture. What would that mean to you and animation at large? And why do you think your fellow Academy members are resistant to putting animated films on the same pedestal as live-action?
Look, I really don’t dream or hope that the change has to happen this year. It can happen next year and this decade. The discussion is very simple: Is this film amongst the 10 best I’ve seen this year? If the answer is yes, put it there. And the answer is no, don’t put it there. It’s very simple. The craft is incredibly complex. Stop-motion animation certainly, is very analog to live action. You have real cinematography, real props, real sets, and real wardrobe—but everything is miniaturized. And everything happens at 24 frames a second. It reminds me of what Ginger Rogers said about Fred Astaire, “I do what you do, but backward in high heels.”
We have had movies every year that are sublime—whether it’s The Red Turtle, Spirited Away, and certainly to me, Toy Story 3—that are incredibly well-crafted movies that are way beyond babysitter movies that you put on for your kids just to keep them quiet. In this arena when we were pitching Pinocchio, they would say “Is it for kids?” And I would say, “It’s not for kids. But kids can watch it if their parents talk to them.”
Do you think there should even be an animation category at the Oscars?
I think so. Look, I think that we can have different types of animation. It’s not about uniforming it into one thing. So, yes, there is a valid argument to be said that you could compete in the same way that you have cinematography or production design, you can have: This is the best animated film and this is one of the best pictures. This is part of the same, and two different, conversations.
My last question: This movie is a painstaking labor of art. Right now, artificial intelligence art is in the spotlight for cutting artists out of the process, often without their permission. Have you been following that at all, and how do you feel about it?
I think that art is an expression of the soul. At its best, it is encompassing everything you are. Therefore, I consume, and love, art made by humans. I am completely moved by that. I am not interested in an illustration made by machines and the extrapolation of information. I talked to Dave Makin, who is a great artist. And he told me, his greatest hope is that AI cannot draw. It can interpolate information, but it cannot draw. It can never capture a feeling, or a countenance, or the softness of a human face, you know? Certainly, if that conversation was being had about film, it would hurt deeply. I would think it, as [Hayao] Miyazaki says, “an insult to life itself.”
