First posted February 2023.

It isn’t surprising that Guillermo del Toro chose to adapt a fairytale into a film. This entire essay series on fairytale influences in his work has, I hope, demonstrated how crucial they are to his process and how plentiful they are in his world. But I have to say it does come as a surprise that his first direct adaptation of a fairytale is a literary, rather than a folkloric one. Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, and both Hellboy films are steeped in the world of folklore, and they’re hardly exceptions in del Toro’s body of work. The earthy, eternal quality that characterises so many of his films evokes the feeling of folklore, the timeless world of stories that exists on another plane with which we can only begin to engage.

Pinocchio isn’t one of those. The Adventures of Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi, is a 19th century novel. It was first published serially, so you could even say it’s more of a short story collection. There is no folkloric story of a puppet boy who comes to life. Pinocchio is an invention of fantasy. Which is not to say literary fairytales count for any less than folkloric ones — Madame de Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast is just as much a fairytale as Apuleius’s Cupid and Psyche. But there’s a different history evoked by the use of a literary fairytale, a different way of understanding a story that was authored in a way an oral story isn’t.

(Quick spoiler for Dimension 20’s Neverafter, but I find it impossible to talk about two concurrent Pinocchio adaptations without at least mentioning — my theory, which as of the time I’m writing this is only informed up to episode 8, is that when the second cycle begins, Pinocchio is the only one to replace himself rather than turn up in a different variant of his story because there is no variant of Pinocchio. As a literary fairytale, only the one version exists. There isn’t another story for him to drop into — this is all he gets.)

If you listened to us talk about Italian fairytales on Ether & Ichor, you’ll already know a bit about the world from which The Adventures of Pinocchio was born. The bar for violence and grisliness in Italian fairytales is set far beyond where most cultures’ folklore sits; Italian stories are bloody, gruesome, and revolting on purpose — they are stories meant to shock and provoke. The influence of these folkloric stories on Collodi’s literary one is unmissable. Pinocchio is a jerk, in a way that’s played for laughs, but leads time and time again to grisly and upsetting scenes. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Disney’s Pinocchio lied to you. This story is distasteful, horrifying, and full of gallows humour: literally, in one scene, in which two characters attempt to hang Pinocchio and get bored of waiting for him to suffocate (which, of course, he can’t, because he’s a puppet. These are the jokes). Death isn’t always very serious in Italian folklore; it’s less a terrifying unknowable enigma than just another topic to engage with, play with, poke fun at, think about. Unlike Disney, del Toro’s Pinocchio engages with the themes of death and reincarnation in Collodi’s novel, but in a more typical del Toro manner: poignant, emotional, dark, and meaningful.

The film begins with death. We meet Geppetto, whose son Carlo was killed when bombs were dropped on their church. Overwhelmed with grief, Geppetto carves a puppet in the shape of a boy, loudly and drunkenly demanding that Carlo come back to him. A sprite in the woods overhears and grants his wish, and the puppet Pinocchio is brought to life.

In one flashback scene, we see Geppetto telling Carlo a story about a hedgehog whose nose grows when he tells lies. While this isn’t a fairytale itself to my knowledge, I suspect del Toro is invoking “Hans My Hedgehog” and other ATU 441 variants (the Italian one of which is a pig rather than a hedgehog, just as a fun aside). It follows the familiar theme invoked by the beginning of the film: a childless parent wishing for a child, though rarely do fairytales begin with the loss of a child and a wish for another. In “Hans My Hedgehog,” the child they receive is a hedgehog from the waist up. By the end of the story, the hedgehog skin is shed and Hans becomes a real man, obviously sharing some similarities with our puppet friend.

Another folkloric nod is the pine from which Pinocchio is carved. In the opening flashbacks, a shot of Carlo picking up a pine cone is set to the narrator saying, “When one life is lost, another must grow.” This both serves to connect Carlo and Pinocchio, and to reinforce the theme of death and rebirth with which this adaptation concerns itself. Pine is sacred to Dionysus, who himself is a symbol of death and rebirth in the Orphic tradition. The death of Dionysus Zagreus saw the god return to the Underworld, and return once more to the world above in his second birth as Dionysus Bromios.

Death is, in fact, a physical figure in del Toro’s Pinocchio, presiding over the cycle of Pinocchio’s reincarnations. The boy made of pine dies and finds himself in a liminal space with a Sphinx-like creature who talks to him as he waits to come back to life. The folklore connection is obvious, but it’s also a very fitting adaptation of the literary tale’s theme of death. In the novel, the Fairy dies and is reborn, as well as Pinocchio and the Cricket. Death is feared, death is played for jokes, and most notably, death is, for some, a temporary state. In del Toro’s adaptation, Death is a figure Pinocchio can actually converse with. The humour and unexamined fear of death in the novel are replaced in the film with an exploration of what life and death mean, of what is right and what simply is, of what is possible and what impossibility is manufactured.

In this space with Death, we’re invited to think about the nature of the Fairy/Sprite and whether what she did was a kindness. Fairies, as del Toro well knows and has explored before with Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy, occupy a space somewhere between benevolent and mischievous. In some stories, they are the gracious granters of wishes, and in others, they are malicious mischief-makers and doers of misdeeds. The Death Sphinx of del Toro’s Pinocchio asks us which her sister, the Sprite, is. Was it kind to bring Carlo back in Pinocchio’s body, and condemn them to come back to life over and over without end? Was it kind to give Geppetto what he asked for, rather than teach him to live with his grief?

While we’re in the realm of death, I want to point to another folklore nod present in del Toro’s adaptation: the psychopomp hares. Across cultures, hares and rabbits are present in folklore as tricksters. In Ireland, hares are associated with the Sidh, and in Greek mythology, hares are sacred to the trickster god Hermes. Trickster characters in folklore are also often psychopomps — spirits that guide souls from one world to the next. Hermes, of course, carries souls from the world of the living to his professional associate, Charon the ferryman, who takes them the rest of the way. The dirge-singing hares of del Toro’s Pinocchio are a perfect folkloric reference, and serve in a way to connect Pinocchio to their realm: while he isn’t strictly speaking a trickster, per se, he certainly has all the personality hallmarks of one. The novel also features two recurring characters, the Fox and the Cat, both folkloric tricksters who toy with Pinocchio over the course of their lives — though neither are present in del Toro’s adaptation, their spirit is represented by the hares.

Death is invoked so light-heartedly in the novel that there isn’t a space to really tackle grief; that del Toro’s adaptation would make space for that isn’t surprising at all. It hits differently in a fairytale; stories often speak of the wishes made and actions done by grieving people, but it simply isn’t a convention of the genre, historically speaking, to really sit with that emotion. In both Pacific Rim and the episode of Cabinet of Curiosities co-written by del Toro, The Murmuring, holding on to grief hurts not only the person doing it but the people around them. It manifests in the Drift and ruptures the connection between pilots. In Pinocchio, Geppetto’s grief hurts Pinocchio, driving him to call the boy a “burden.”

There comes a point in many children’s lives when they realise they are a burden. People who don’t want children and have them out of a sense of obligation displace the blame for their actions on the children. Sometimes an accident can’t be taken care of and society won’t take care of its own. Sometimes disaster strikes and a lifestyle that was once manageable no longer is. Whatever the reason, there are countless Hansels and Gretels left out in the woods because their father can no longer bear the burden of their existence. There are countless youngest children sent out to seek their fortune in the world on their own. There are countless Pinocchios, fleeing in the middle of the night and setting out to make right wrongs that weren’t theirs.

Pinocchio’s adventures in the film are colourful and fun, but grief weighs too heavily on his life for him to ever really emerge from underneath it. He constantly asks Vulpe (an amalgamation of the novel’s Mangiafuoco and the Fox) to ensure money is being sent to Geppetto, to ease the burden of poverty. Geppetto’s grief over the loss of Carlo becomes Pinocchio’s grief that he can’t be who his father wants. It’s this inherited grief that drives Pinocchio’s increasingly frantic visits to Death, and eventually leads to his transformation into a real boy, by breaking the rules — completing the circle left open by the breaking of rules that led to his animation in the first place.

In a behind the scenes feature, del Toro spoke of this movie in conversation with Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, in the sense of “a pure soul being tested and coming out the other side strong.” It’s no coincidence that all three of these movies take place against a backdrop of war. It’s least subtly illustrated in the transformation of Toy Island into a fascist youth camp: war is nonsensical, war is folly, war is the absence of reason. Nothing tests us like life during wartime — and nothing heals like a fairytale. At the end of each of these films is magic: a fairytale princess, a ghost, an immortal puppet.

All three films are paintings of desperation and hope, of inhabiting worlds we have no lasting place in, and becoming something wounded, but real — that is to say, illustrations of the way fairytales and their heroes survive a world of chaos and war. Ofelia takes her rightful place in her father’s kingdom, Carlos sets Santi free and walks outside to a future unknown, and Pinocchio comes back to life a final time, to live out his days and watch those he loves live out theirs. All three are bittersweet: Ofelia dies, Carlos’s future is bleak, and Pinocchio watches as everyone he loves grows old and dies while he does not.

The film ends as it began, with death. Leaving the graves of Carlo, Geppetto, and Spazzatura, Pinocchio walks over the hill and out of sight as the Cricket (whose corpse travels inside Pinocchio’s heart) narrates, “What happens, happens. And then we are gone.” It isn’t the fairytale ending we’re used to, but it has something of the Italian folktale about it. It’s a bit of a shrug, but also a reassurance. Terrible things happen. Wonderful things happen. The ‘ever after’ will find you; the ‘happily’ isn’t guaranteed. The joy Pinocchio brought to others, and still brings to others, dies and comes back, just like he does. But, as the Sprite says, “real boys don’t come back.” This fairytale leaves us with a typical del Toro ending — with the reminder that life is beautiful, that those who leave us have left beautiful things, and that our job is to appreciate it while we’re here and leave beautiful things for those who come after us.