A Beloved Classic Reborn: Your Boy Pinocchio Is Back, But He’s Not Your Child Anymore!? Movie Pick: Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio
Your favorite kid Pinocchio is back, but he’s not the same kid you once knew anymore…
Intro
Meow meow everyone, welcome back! Today I want to talk about the movie that’s left the biggest impression on me lately, “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.” After watching it I was left with just one feeling: it’s the same story, and yet somehow something feels different!?
Since you’ve all definitely heard the story of Pinocchio already, I’m not going to worry about spoilers this time! I’ll just write down all my thoughts directly. “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is exactly the classic fairy tale puppet adventure you’re imagining, and the overall structure of the plot is pretty much the same. Geppetto is a woodcarver in a small town, and he has a little boy named Carlo. Carlo loses his life in an accident, and because of this tragedy old Geppetto is devastated and falls into a deep slump from which he can’t recover. His love for the boy moves a spirit, who decides to give the old man another chance: she brings to life the wooden figure that Geppetto carved in memory of his little boy, and that little figure declares himself to be Pinocchio.
So naturally the old man comes to see Pinocchio as Carlo and raises him like his own grandson. But mischievous Pinocchio gets noticed by a circus ringmaster on his very first day of school, who lures him away to work for him… The rest of the story unfolds just like you remember, so I won’t go over it all again. Let’s get straight to the point!
Official trailer on YouTube:
Pinocchio is Pinocchio, Carlo is Carlo
The whole movie cleverly plays with the idea of inherited memory. Even though Pinocchio carries part of Carlo’s memories, the two of them have completely different personalities. Just when you think the happily-ever-after ending is about to arrive, the movie throws another challenge and setback at the old man, and it can’t help but make you wonder: maybe… our own parents went through this same thing with us too. Right when our parents are celebrating that we finally stopped wetting the bed, they then have to keep us in line so we don’t get corrupted by the bad kids at elementary school or by everything society throws at children. And once your mind and body are strong enough, they have to start worrying about whether you’ve picked up some weird knowledge from some adult channel.
Watching this film, I couldn’t help but keep thinking about my own parents. And I thought about how I was just as much of a troublemaker when I was little.
But even so, the old man never gives up on Pinocchio. Instead, he loves Carlo in the very way he loved Carlo, even though Pinocchio isn’t his own son, even though his own son is never coming back. He still loves what he has. It’s just like parents: no matter how much of a mess they are, they still love you; no matter how immature they are, no matter how many bad things they’ve done, your parents are always the safe harbor watching over you.
Every character wants to get something from Pinocchio. But when you stop and think about it, maybe none of them are really that bad?
The second point worth paying attention to is that everyone wants to take something away from Pinocchio. There are three characters in this film who want to claim Pinocchio: the old man, the circus ringmaster, and the army commander. What each of them wants to take from Pinocchio is, respectively: to have the boy himself, to make money by putting him in a freak show, and to send him off to be a soldier (because he can’t die). Every time I saw scenes like that my eyes would sting, because even though Pinocchio doesn’t understand, as long as he’s alive he keeps getting used, and because he doesn’t understand he keeps getting deceived. He even signs a wildly unfair contract.
Even though he spends his whole life constantly being used, constantly being lured away by those greedy adults, he still knows what he wants: all he wants is to keep loving the old man. It makes me think that maybe one day we all grow up, and one day we all have to face having to take care of ourselves. There always comes a day when you realize you’ve become the one who uses or gets used, and maybe you’ll deceive someone or control someone in order to achieve some goal of your own, just like the evil ringmaster and the officer. But that’s the eternal, unchanging law of this world: if you don’t eat others, then you’ll be the one who gets eaten. Looking back, maybe the ringmaster wasn’t really that bad, he was just pushed by circumstance; maybe that officer wasn’t really that bad either, the whole country just demanded it of him.
So what does Pinocchio want? Maybe he just wants to get back to the old man’s side. In fact, if you look at it from another angle, Pinocchio is the one who’s truly using the ringmaster and the commander, because he uses them to gain a lifelong friend and to get the chance to escape from adversity. So no one is truly the villain, but the most important thing of all is to keep a pure heart and look at this world with open eyes.
We’re all Pinocchio
But by the very end of the story, I slowly came to realize that maybe I’m Pinocchio, maybe we’re all Pinocchio. Dropped into this world for no clear reason, spending all our days chasing after others, chasing after a dream we maybe don’t even understand yet ourselves. And yet we’re always made happy by the simplest things, always driven to fight for the simplest reasons. We’re all Pinocchio, and Pinocchio isn’t a puppet, he’s a kid who survives through adversity and lives happily, just like me.
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Thanks everyone for reading. Today’s movie review might have been a little different, and I’m not sure how many people made it through, but thank you anyway for reading this far! If you’d like to read more articles, there are links below, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d follow along too!