GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO

You'd be hard-pressed to call Pinocchio a bad film, but it's a lot closer to a let-down than it is to a triumph, partly because Guillermo del Toro keeps pillaging his own oeuvre for inspiration.

Was there really a need for another Pinocchio film so shortly after Robert Zemeckis' abysmal Disney remake and the visually imposing Italian adaptation from 2022? Guillermo del Toro definitely seemed to think so and in patches it appears he is right.

The tale gains extra poignancy by the inspired decision to set it during the rise of fascism in Italy - with even a Mussolini cameo - and the stop-start nature of the gorgeously rendered stop-motion animation is an exquisite fit for the story about the wooden boy who longs to be human.

Still, this Pinocchio is in equal amounts frustrating: the picture has an overindulgent two-hour runtime, the design of the human characters is at times downright ugly and by making the lead character even more childlike and naïve than in most other tellings you lose some sympathy for the wooden boy.

Also: del Toro's tendency to pillage his own oeuvre, both visually and narratively, for unnecessary subplots starts to grate after a while. You'd still be hard-pressed to call Pinocchio a bad film, but it's a lot closer to a let-down than it is to a triumph.

release: 2022

director: Guillermo del Toro

starring: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton