Will Guillermo del Toro win his first animated film Oscar? That’s the question posed by Hollywood’s hyperventilating trade press last week. Calm blood, take a deep breath, if you wanted to whisper in the direction of Los Angeles. Just because the double Oscar winner from Mexico (“Shape of Water”, 2018) is making his debut here doesn’t mean he has to be at the top right away.
Well, if you’ve seen del Toro’s version of “Pinocchio”, you can understand the gasps of the observers. How the 58-year-old interprets the children’s book character of the Italian writer Carlo Collodi (1826-1890) is breathtaking – in form and content. As for looks, del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson, an American animator and TV Oscar winner Emmy winner for the modeling clay ‘Claymation Easter’ (1992), opted for stop motion Frames of dolls giving the illusion of movement). Each doll is a masterpiece that connects a visual bracket: just as Master Geppetto carves a boy, figures have been created that reflect the nature of trees and wood in delightful detail.
Geppetto’s face is reminiscent of the gnarledness of old, tangled branches, of the cracked structure of bark. Pinocchio is perfectly in the juice, polished smooth, with a delicate grain. In terms of content, it wouldn’t be a Del Toro film if an extraordinary love – one between a human being (father) and a supernatural being (son) – wasn’t polished in its beautiful and hard aspects by three things: politics, economy and fantasy. Master craftsman Geppetto carves his own jumping jack in a mountain village in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy in the 1930s. A sphinx-like nature spirit breathes life into him to ease Geppetto’s grief over his son, who was killed by a World War I bomb. A creature with whom Count Volpi, director of a traveling circus, can make good money.
Christoph Waltz speaks Volpi
With animation master Patrick McHale (Emmy for “Adventure Time”), del Toro developed a fairy tale with dance and music of refreshing unpredictability based on Collodi’s prehistory.
Pictorially, comedicly and emotionally, it draws on what its backgrounds have to offer. It sparkles with childlike energy, has a somber mysticism, is as bright as a bell, deeply sad, courageous and yet still has laconic wit on the abyss. We recommend the original English version, in which Ewan McGregor as Cricket and Christoph Waltz as Volpi trumps. “Pinocchio” was a heart project that del Toro has been pushing since 2008. In 2017, at the Venice Film Festival, he said he needed a $35 million budget. No big studio wanted it, then Netflix took over. Now a terrific film, which everything but the screen shrinks, is running in cinemas for a short two weeks before it starts streaming on December 9th.
Should del Toro win the Oscar, it would be a jarring blow to studios lost in the superhero mainstream.
“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”: USA/MEX/F 2022, 116 min., now exclusively at Moviemento Linz, from December 9th Netflix
OÖN Rating:
- The trailer for the film:
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Source: Nachrichten
