On Tuesday (June 14), movie lovers were given a first look by Vanity Fair at Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming stop-motion animated film Pinocchio, which is based on a character created by Italian writer Carlo Collodi in the late 19th century. It is del Toro’s first stop-motion animated film of his career.
“I’ve always been very intrigued by the links between Pinocchio and Frankenstein,” del Toro told Vanity Fair. “They are both about a child that is thrown into the world. They are both created by a father who then expects them to figure out what’s good, what’s bad, the ethics, the morals, love, life, and essentials, on their own. I think that was, for me, childhood. You had to figure it out with your very limited experience.”
Set during the rise of fascism in 1930s Italy, Netflix has described the film as “a story of love and disobedience as Pinocchio struggles to live up to his father’s expectations.”
Based on artist Gris Grimly’s 2002 design of the titular character, del Toro’s Pinocchio looks much darker than previous versions of the narrative. In one of the images released Tuesday, Pinocchio, a wooden marionette, is seen pushing on the nose of his father, a woodcarver named Geppetto.
Another image release is of Sebastian J. Cricket (in the original Disney movie, he is renamed Jiminy Cricket), a character who helps Pinocchio on his journey to becoming a real boy. In the photo, Sebastian looks like he’s going on his own adventure, walking through nature carrying a knapsack and lantern. In a third photo, Pinocchio is resting on top of Geppetto’s wood carving table with a lollipop in his hand and flanked by two fiendishly looking puppets, one of them a devil.
A live-action version of Disney’s Pinocchio is also being released this year starring Tom Hanks. “I have been very vocal about my admiration and my great, great love for Disney all my life, but that is an impulse that actually makes me move away from that version,” del Toro said.
Del Toro’s version has a cast that includes the voices of Ewan McGregor, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, Christoph Waltz, and Tilda Swinton. His Pinocchio debuts on Netflix in December 2022.