This essay contains spoilers for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Children
At first glance, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (named after the director to distinguish it from Disney’s cash-grab live-action remake of this same year) seems a continuation of themes established in the director’s earlier works The Devil’s Backbone (2001) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006): fascism as seen through children’s eyes, and the essential innocence of those who resist.
Rather than the antiquated setting of Carlo Colloni’s original novel, del Toro transposes Pinocchio to the early days of the 20th century, when Italy careened through two nationalist wars within three decades. Master carpenter Gepetto loses his son Carlo to World War I bombers not even intending to hit their small Italian town. Decades later, still mourning and in a drunken stupor, he cuts down the pine tree planted at Carlo’s grave to become his new son. Through this grief and the mercy of a passing spirit, Pinocchio comes into the world with World War II on the horizon and fascist graffiti on buildings.
With its PG rating, Pinocchio stands out as an all-ages film among its darker predecessors for older audiences. Its broad yet harmless humor reads to all ages, and the fantastical set pieces capture fairytale (yet very real) peril in a thrilling and captivating way. The stakes are high, but delivered in a straightforward and non-graphic manner; there are no bloody executions and mutilations (at least on screen) as in Pan’s Labyrinth. But death, loss, and grief are omnipresent. Pinocchio perhaps emphasizes even more than del Toro’s earlier works the centrality of death to the fascist mindset and the way this can warp young minds.
Pinocchio emerges from a strange mercy granted to a bereaved man, and as this aberration is not truly alive or dead. It is a charming position for this unruly child with no impulse control—the wooden boy is pure innocence, and as such is impossible to control. He finds out about his strange mortality after being run over by a car to escape Gepetto and Count Volpe, a circus master, fighting over his future. Death exasperatedly explains his situation and the rules governing it, and Pinocchio gleefully takes advantage of each return journey to disregard the rules of life—more importantly, Mussolini’s rules of fascism.
Astutely, del Toro does not make his child hero a martyr or rebel in this innocence. Pinocchio’s disobedience is initially rooted in maddening selfishness. He is set into the world with a fully formed body, vocabulary, and devotion to his Papa but no sense of the rules governing his society. When he comes up against each of these, he loudly protests common courtesies and everyday cruelties alike. Only when Pinocchio’s moral compass grows through his own experience, as he figures out the ways of his world and the injustices he sees from Count Volpe and the Italian fascist army, does he begin to understand the weight of his many sacrifices and the weight his Papa has carried for years.
Death
As with much fiction dealing with the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, the Gothic vein is strong in The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. These fairy tales deal with the otherworldly and were told to teach young children the rules of life and death. Pinocchio dies, and dies, and dies, returning to life through the wild logic that makes sense to him and his existence but fundamentally clashes with the fascist death cult.
Fascism sees itself as a life-or-death struggle against those who stand in its unyielding way. The ideology celebrates these deaths for the cause with stone monuments and disdains the lives of its opponents in unmarked shallow graves. As Mark Neocleous argues, the elaborate ceremonies fascism constructs around the dead, notably Mussolini’s and Franco’s, fascism assumes that these dead are ever-present and may arise again at a final reckoning—a perversion of many religious tenets in service of a hateful cause.
When drafted into the Italian youth force following his execution for mocking Mussolini, Pinocchio is reminded that most have only one life to give for their country, but he has many. It takes a while for this statement to permeate Pinocchio’s innocence, but the blatant disregard for life is chillingly evocative of the Spanish Falangist rallying cry “Long live death," preserved on historic radio broadcasts from the decade before Pinocchio is set.
With Pinocchio and his earlier works, del Toro seems to challenge this mantra. Death is omnipresent, inevitable, and unprejudiced. It leaves gaping holes in the lives of those left behind but makes the beauty, fragility, and stubborn hope of life so much sweeter in its impermanence. The film is joyous and anarchic in tone, but instead of offering a soothing antidote to darkness, this levity serves both to find fascism’s ironies and cherish small moments of goodness.
Gepetto is ruined by the senseless, accidental death of Carlo—one that occurs in the Church where he painstakingly crafts a new Christ on the cross to hang above the altar. At once, both love and artistry are taken away from him. As the decades progress, and as Pinocchio comes into the world, the pair see their fellow countrymen and children sent to their deaths for ideologies they may not understand and cannot challenge.
When Pinocchio risks permanent death to save Gepetto’s singular life, the threat of real human death avoids fascist glorification. Saving a beloved family member is both selfish and selfless, sprung from an understanding of the randomness of the world and refusing to accept it. Pinocchio seems to finally understand the weight of lives cut short by war and hate, as Ofelia does in Pan’s Labyrinth. Here, a puppet whose joints bend disconcertingly achieves more agency than his flesh and blood companions puppetted by authoritarianism.
Disobedience
Throughout the press tour for Pinocchio, del Toro has adamantly reiterated the value of disobedience in the story and the creative process:
"To me, the interesting thing is “can I make a Pinocchio that celebrates disobedience, as opposed to celebrating obedience? Can I make a Pinocchio in which he doesn't have to turn into a real boy because he was obedient at the end?”
He further stated that he held no test screenings and did not expect his animation team to respond to notes given, bringing this ethos of disobedience throughout the production and ensuring he and his team made exactly the film they wanted to make. This dedication to noncompliance and individuality is Pinocchio’s ethos in practice; it’s easy to imagine the rebellious wooden boy running amok and creating something terrible, brilliant, and wild if given such free rein himself.
Fascism lacks imagination, warmth, and ultimately life beyond mere existence. Pinocchio is a fairy tale in the purest, most ancient sense of the word, restored to the original gnarly forms the likes of Disney have stripped away. Instead of aggrandizing sacrifice for a cause or country, death becomes the simple, uncomplicated end—often tragic, never in vain. Del Toro’s trilogy of anti-fascist disobedience feels all too timely and urgent, but Pinocchio’s unruly noncompliance makes him an apt hero for today.