Year 15, Day 87 - 3/28/23 - Movie #4,388
BEFORE: John Turturro carries over from "Fearless", and even though I just KNEW this one was going to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, this was the earliest I could get around to watching it, given that I devoted February to romance films as usual, and considering where I started the year, in a tough linking place. My next thought was to save this one for October, because it connects a bunch of horror films - but then I kind of looked into "Nightmare Alley" and realized it's not really a horror film, and this shares a few actors with "Nightmare Alley", so let's just cross them both off this week and hope that a well-linked October chain will still be possible. I'll come up with something, I'm sure. But this week I'm going to cover both Del Toros, Benicio AND Guillermo.
It's Day 28 of TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming, and today's themes are "Travel Movies" (before 8 pm) and "Prison" (8 pm and after.) Here's the line-up:
6:30 am "Rich, Young and Pretty" (1951)
8:30 am "Romance on the High Seas" (1948)
10:30 am "Travels With My Aunt" (1972)
12:30 pm "Royal Wedding" (1951)
2:30 pm "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" (1961)
4:00 pm "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (1951)
6:00 pm "A Little Romance" (1979)
8:00 pm "Cool Hand Luke" (1967)
10:15 pm "The Big House" (1930)
12:00 am "Papillon" (1973)
2:45 am "Birdman of Alcatraz" (1962)
5:15 am "Caged" (1950)
7:00 am "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932)
9:00 am "Fury" (1936)
Damn, only four out of 14 - "Royal Wedding", "Cool Hand Luke", "Papillon" and "Birdman of Alcatraz". Well, I have watched a LOT of prison movies, so it's no surprise I did better in that category. This takes me to 145 seen out of 320, down just a bit to 45.3%.
THE PLOT: A father's wish magically brings a wooden boy to life in Italy, giving him a chance to care for the child.
AFTER: I hate to encourage the use of a director's name within the title of a film - I took Lee Daniels' name out of the title for "The Butler" because I feel this is an abhorrent practice. (Tyler Perry, I'm calling you out.). The film should always be more important than the director, we didn't allow "James Cameron's Titanic" or "Steven Spielberg's The Fablemans" with good reason, so across the board, this usage needs to be discontinued, in my opinion. However, there was another version of "Pinocchio" that got released by Disney in the same 12-month span, so I get it, they had to distinguish this film from that one, which from the look of things, really sucked.
In December last year, Guillermo came to town to do a full-court press promotion for this film, based on the number of invitations that my boss got for screenings, there were at least a dozen taking place across New York City in the same week. I signed my boss up for two of them, just in case the first one was super-crowded and he couldn't get in - but he did, and he spoke with Del Toro and got his picture taken with him, and then a couple days later, Del Toro came to the theater where I work part-time, but I've been trained not to approach the famous people. However, I knew the co-director of the film from a previous life working for Laika Studios' NYC office, when a director would come in from Portland we'd take them to creative meetings at ad agencies and then buy a bunch of tickets to Coraline or Paranorman and make an event out of it. The director would usually bring some stop-motion characters and props to display, so we called it "the puppet show".
Guillermo stayed outside in the SUV until right before the movie began, but when he came out he shook hands with his fans and signed some posters before heading into the theater - once it was all over a ton of fans still hung around to meet the directors and animators, even after Guillermo left. So I got to talk with the co-director, Mark Gustafson, and I reminded him that I used to drive him around town when he visited NY years ago. He was showing people some of the Pinocchio character models, so he's still doing "the puppet show", but obviously he's been very successful since moving on from Laika. And now he has an Oscar for "Pinocchio", I don't know what comes next but it will probably take ten years to get made, considering how long the production time is for a stop-motion animated feature.
Reading through the development process on Wikipedia is quite fascinating - Del Toro teamed up with Gustafson in 2011 to start making the film, with a plan to release it in 2013 or 2014, but then the film went into development hell, with no progress being made for years, due to the high cost of stop-motion animation. But Netflix came up with $35 million in 2017, and the script got reworked to update the classic story with references to World War II-era Italy, so everything was back on.
Apparently the longest part of the process was designing the characters, however this was obviously also tied to the story development, the two go hand-in-hand - in the original story, Pinocchio is led astray by a fox and a cat, who were anthropomorphized into show-business characters in the animated Disney version, but here those characters were turned into Count Volpe and his monkey, Spazzatura. The fox character got sort of merged with the original story's Mangiafuoco, the director of the puppet theater (who was re-named Stromboli in the Disney version). That's the process of filmmaking, if you find you have too many characters, sometimes the best thing to do is combine two of them into one who serves several narrative purposes.
Now, as for the time-frame, which is something I've heard people complaining about - namely setting this version of "Pinocchio" in two periods: World War I (presumably when Geppetto's son, Carlo, dies from a bomb dropped on the cathedral) and World War II (when Pinocchio and other Italian youth are sent away to military training camp) I don't really have a problem with this. Some people's reviews contained "I just didn't like the Mussolini stuff..." because the original story was written in the 1880's, way before either World War. But you can change the time-frame of a story to make it more relevant for modern audiences - in the 1963 comic-book origin of Iron Man, Tony Stark was an arms dealer during the Vietnam War, and created the Iron Man armor in a cave in while being held prisoner by the Viet Cong. Forty-plus years later, in the Marvel movie "Iron Man", this happened in Afghanistan, not Vietnam, to be more relevant to today's audiences. Similarly, by moving Pinocchio's story to World War II, it feels closer somehow, and we all still remember who Mussolini was, but we sure don't collectively remember the 1880's.
There are a ton of characters and side-plots in the source material, so Del Toro and his team were probably able to pick and choose which ones were the most relevant - and they did pick some of the same touchpoints as the famous Disney movie, like Geppetto being swallowed by the giant whale/dogfish, and the Cricket who serves as the conscience/heart of Pinocchio - here it's more literal, as the cricket lives inside Pinocchio's wooden torso, where his heart would be, if he had one. Disney called the cricket "Jiminy Cricket", here the cricket's name is Sebastian J. Cricket, but this is a minor point. Also here the cricket dies or almost dies several times, this is true to the source material, where the cricket is a ghost in the later parts of the tale.
For that matter, Pinocchio "dies" a few times in this film, although not really, because in order to die you have to be alive, and Pinocchio is not really alive. So each time he "dies" he goes to the spirit realm and then returns soon after, although the time spent away from the world of the living gets longer each time. There's something of a similarity to the Frankenstein novel, because in both stories inanimate or dead matter is brought to life by lightning or magic, and the resulting creature isn't really alive, but is able to walk around and try to understand the world with his limited brain, or lack of a brain, in Pinocchio's case. Like Frankenstein's Monster, Pinocchio here is misunderstood at first, and frightens the general populace, but he means well. And hey, "Young Frankenstein" is another example of taking a story originally set in the 1800's and moving it up to a more modern time period, just for comic effect.
I've got a quibble with the part near the end, though, when Pinocchio and Spazzatura get swallowed by the giant dogfish and find Geppetto and his boat already inside. There's a way to escape through the giant fish's blowhole, but in order to access it, Pinocchio has to tell a bunch of lies so that his nose will grow and form a tree-like ladder they can all climb up. The whole entire story of Pinocchio is based around him learning NOT to lie, to tell the truth and go to school and learn to be like a real boy. Encouraging the character to lie seems a bit counter-productive to the point of the tales, even if it saves their lives in the moment. If I were a screen-writer, I'd look for a better way to get them out of this situation, that's all.
Then when Pinocchio dies again to set off the bomb and kill the fish, he wants to return immediately to the world of the living, but to do that, he has to become mortal, and then if he dies again as a real boy, he can't come back. Only THAT gets undone by a wish, so there were just too many reversals at the end of the story. So, at the end of the story, is Pinocchio mortal or immortal? A real boy or an animated puppet? Who can even tell after so many reversals?
There's a large dramatic irony in seeing ONE character who's a puppet in a world of people who are supposed to be real, but are also played by stop-motion puppets. Wait...yes, that's right. And then on top of that, to have the story set in Fascist Italy, where many people (who are played by puppets) act like obedient puppets to a dictator's regime. Right? It's so meta...
I want to give this an "8" because of how much damn work went into making this - over 1,000 days of stop-motion animation (outside of Portland, Oregon) but I have to take off half a point for the director's name being in the title, and another half point for all the extra reversals at the end. But I can't decide if I need to reward or penalize the film for hiring Cate Blanchett just to make monkey noises. That's dumb, but it's also ballsy.
Also starring the voices of Ewan McGregor (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), David Bradley (last seen in "The Young Messiah"), Gregory Mann (last seen in "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Pacific Rim: Uprising"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Don't Look Up"), Finn Wolfhard (last seen in "How It Ends"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "The Good German"), Tim Blake Nelson (last seen in "Colossal"), Christoph Waltz (last seen in "No Time to Die"), Tilda Swinton (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Tom Kenny (last seen in "World's Greatest Dad"), Anthea Greco, Francesca Fanti (last heard in "Luca"), Rio Mangini, Luciano Palmeri.
RATING: 7 out of 10 Undertaker Rabbits
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