Analysis: Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is the latest of innumerable adaptations, reworkings and revisions since the story was first published
"I want to tell you a story", says the wood-sprite in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, 'it’s a story you may think you know, but you don’t". Netflix are set to release a stop motion animation adaptation of Pinocchio, directed by the Academy Award winning director of The Shape of Water, and it will be his first animated feature.
Viewers of del Toro’s film may indeed be surprised that his Pinocchio is so different to the character and the story with which they are familiar. But the story of Pinocchio has been the subject of innumerable adaptations, reworkings and revisions since its original publication. It has been translated into more than a hundred languages and is even the centre of a vast field of study called Pinocchiology.
From Netflix, trailer for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
The story was penned by Italian author Carlo Collodi, and first appeared in serial form in a children’s weekly publication between 1881 and 1882, before being published as a complete novel The Adventures of Pinnocchio in 1883. Jack Zipes notes that Collodi himself made very little money out of the publication because of poor copyright laws at the time.
It began to be translated almost immediately. It was first published in the UK in 1891, in a version translated by Mary Alice Murray, and then in the US in 1898. Its American title, Pinocchio’s Adventures in Wonderland, was no doubt to attract readers already familiar with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Outlining the publication history of Collodi’s novel, Richard Wunderlich points out that this version astonishingly did not credit the translator, the illustrator or even Collodi himself. The story seemed to have taken on a life of its own and escaped from its author, just as the living puppet escapes his master to go on his adventures in the story.
From CBS Sunday Morning, Lee Cowan visits Collodi, the Tuscan town which is the birthplace of Pinocchio and its creator journalist-author Carlo Lorenzini, who took the town's name as his pen name
Excisions and additions to the original Pinocchio tale were present from the early years. A significant change occurred in the characterisation of the wooden boy during the era of the Great Depression in the 1930s. Collodi presents Pinocchio as an irascible puppet, apathetic about schoolwork and labour, desiring instant gratification and merriment; an impetuous character whose journey towards maturity and a sense of morality is a long one, with many missteps along the way.
But in the 1930s, he becomes a much more sympathetic character, a good but gullible boy who the victim of external corrupting forces. The most influential version of this Pinocchio is Walt Disney's animated feature, released in 1940. The film was Disney's second full-length animated feature (the first was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs), and a live-action remake of the film was released earlier in 2022, directed by Robert Zemeckis, with his long-standing collaborator Tom Hanks playing Gepetto. The film is part of a series of live-action remakes of Disney films in recent years that includes Aladdin, Dumbo, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.
The two Disney Pinocchio films look very similar, with the live action version carefully recreating the animated film’s set designs for Gepetto’s house, the surrounding village, and several of the characters, namely Pinocchio, Gepetto, and Gepetto’s cat Figaro and fish Cleo. But the live action version contains some important revisions. Some are included to remove or edit elements that would no longer be considered acceptable in a children’s film.
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From RTÉ Radio 1's Arena, Tara Brady and Darryl Jones review the 2020 version of Pinocchio starring Roberto Benigni as the lonely carpenter Geppetto
In the live action version, the montage of Gepetto’s cuckoo clocks show them to be modelled on Disney characters. In the original, the cuckoo clocks include representations of a man shooting a bird, a turkey being killed, and a woman smacking the bare bottom of a child. Scenes that include smoking in the original film have been excised: in the animated film’s depiction of Pleasure Island, there is a street called ‘Tobacco Row’ and the children are encouraged to ‘come in here and smoke your heads off’. In fact, the film now comes with a warning that it contains scenes of tobacco smoking.
Some revisions have been included to create a more diverse set of characters. Cynthia Erivo plays the Blue fairy in the live action version, and remarks that black girls have not necessarily been part of ‘this lexicon of work in the past’ and can now see themselves represented as "magical beings, mermaids, fairies, and fairy godmothers".
The live-action version also includes two new characters, a female puppeteer, Fabiana, who works for Stromboli’s circus, and her puppet Sabina. Fabiana has a metal contraption on her leg, but still wears a ballet shoe. She befriends Pinocchio through her puppet Sabina and the film shows her managing to get away from Stromboli and form her own independent puppet theatre.
Trailer for Disney's 2022 Pinocchio film
The most important change in the live-action Disney version is the ending (spoiler alert) in which Pinocchio does not turn into a real boy. He saves his father and proves himself, but the film does not require him to change form, and his father ultimately accepts and loves him as he is.
Although Del Toro’s Pinocchio is being released within months of the Disney live action remake, the project has been in the making for many years. The trailer promises a film that is visually stunning, with incredibly detailed artistry on display in the puppets, the props and the sets, and behind the scenes footage footage showing how lovingly and laboriously the scenes were created in more than a thousand days of shooting that it took to create the film.
From Netflix, Guillermo del Toro talks about the stop-motion work behind his new film
The film is based on Gris Grimly's designs from his 2002 edition of the novel, which have a distinctly Gothic aspect. The setting, in Mussolini’s Italy, brings a darkness to the story missing in either of Disney’s versions, as does the film’s exploration of death. Pinocchio is a replacement for Gepetto’s son, Carlo (a tribute to Collodi, perhaps), a casualty of war, so deals with grief and loss, and also examines Pinocchio’s desire to be a real boy as a desire for mortality.
The story of Pinocchio is a story about transformation, but it is also a story that itself has been itself repeatedly transformed, in different social contexts and different historical periods. Del Toro sees this as the key to the story's longevity: 'I think the idea is that Pinocchio is one of 10 or 12 characters in literature that can be transformed by who tells the story and what is told to the story’. This stop-motion animation promises a return to the flawed Pinocchio of Collodi’s original tale, but it's a return that is, fittingly, yet another metamorphosis in the long history of the adventures of Pinocchio.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
