Pinocchio is Guillermo del Toro’s most extraordinary movie since Pan’s Labyrinth

polygon.com:

This review was published in conjunction with the movie’s premiere at the 2022 BFI London Film Festival. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio will debut on Netflix in December.

From the opening frames of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, you know this is a del Toro film — and not just because of the possessive title. He’s a filmmaker with a visual signature as strong as Tim Burton or Wes Anderson, albeit one that hasn’t hardened so formally, and still has the ability to adapt and to surprise. With Pinocchio, del Toro turns, as both those directors have, to stop-motion animation, which allows him to retain the texture of his live-action work while controlling the look of every single element in the frame.

But the film’s success is about more than looks. What’s surprising about Pinocchio is how personal to del Toro it feels, despite him sharing director credit with Mark Gustafson, despite its shoot overlapping with that of Nightmare Alley, despite the work of its creation being done by teams of artisans spread across three continents. This Netflix animated film might be the most del Toro movie since Pan’s Labyrinth; it’s certainly one of the best since then, and as distinctive as any of his English-language work.

What it isn’t is anything like the timeless 1940 Walt Disney film, or its recent, lifeless remake, or either of the two Roberto Benigni-starring, live-action Italian takes, or any of the dozens of other attempts to adapt Carlo Collodi’s 1883 book. Extraordinarily, it is the first to be done in stop-motion, and thus the first in which Pinocchio, the wooden puppet boy who comes to life, is played by an actual puppet. Beyond this, del Toro (who co-wrote the script, as well as the lyrics for a handful of songs) takes a few