No strings attached – Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

The filmmaking team on giving life to the classic fable and creating poetry in stop-motion.

- By Matt Maytum

"I had this idea that the best way to deal with Pinocchio was to make him part of a stop-motion movie,” Guillermo del Toro tells Teasers. “Because everybody’s on a level playing field. All the characters blend very well with the puppet character.”

As del Toro speaks – on the promo trail during the London Film Festival – he’s cradling his leading puppet in his hands. Standing around nine inches tall, the wooden boy loses an eye during our conversation, which fellow director Mark Gustafson – who shares helming duties on the film – picks from the floor and pops back into place.

“We needed him to be very robust, because he’s the star of our film,” explains Gustafson, “and we really put him through the wringer in terms of animation.” This Pinocchio’s picaresque journey is set against the backdrop of Mussolini’s fascist Italy. While key elements of the story are familiar – a woodcarver’s puppet boy comes to life, joins a performing troupe, takes moral guidance from a cricket – this is unlike any of the many previous film adaptations of Carlo Collodi’s 19thcentury novel that you might have seen (according to del Toro’s “informal count”, there are around 65 of them).

There is no risk of this handcrafted original being confused with any predecessors. As del Toro explains, “I wanted the possessory credit, because you have Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, you have Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, and this is Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.”