Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio: A Powerful Message for Parents

Guillermo Del Toro’s films do not always grab me — but his version of Pinocchio had me in the palm of its hand. I was charmed, perhaps mostly by its casual approach to issues of great depth. The film’s stop-motion animation obviously required great effort, as did the layered script, but the film bears its achievements lightly. Its critique of fascism is unpretentious (it is set in Mussolini’s Italy in the 1940s), never losing sight of the real lives at stake in abstract political machinations. Perhaps the film’s focus on the mundane complexities of everyday life, the willingness to take seriously even laughable human emotions like vanity or embarrassment — perhaps this approach is the only way to really critique fascism without becoming some kind of fascist oneself.

The point of Pinocchio is not (or not only) that fascism is bad. It is about a much more subtle and relatable process. It is about how we recover from the often tempting and self-destructive illusion that fascism is actually good! Gepetto, Pinocchio’s maker and father, is made into a tyrant by grief for his real son who dies near the beginning of the film. What is the way out of Gepetto’s inner tyranny? The movie answers this question by way of a life that should not be — Pinnochio’s uncontainable and chaotic curiosity, his rambunctious spirit. Del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson breathe new meaning into an old metaphor: the puppet without strings. Like the very good Star Wars show Andor from 2022, this movie knows that fascism is founded on a faulty premise. The logic of total control ends up working itself to death. We cannot live up to the heartless vigilance that true fascism requires. Life will outlive it.

If we could, we’d make our world out of wood, so we could be in charge. But growth — and specifically parenting — means becoming suspicious of this impulse (instead of attempting to systematize it, as fascism does). You cannot really love a puppet, of course. Nor a memory. Nor an icon. It has to be alive. I was blown away by one moment in particular: Pinocchio has come to life and his boisterousness has already gotten him in trouble with some of the townsfolk. In a church where Gepetto as the town carpenter is working on an enormous wooden cross, Pinocchio points to the crucified body of Jesus and asks him: “He’s made of wood too. Why do they like him and not me?” Great question.