Guillermo del Toro Talks About His PINOCCHIO Film and Compares It to FRANKENSTEIN

Guillermo del Toro is still developing his film adaptation of Pinocchio. Pinocchio will be a stop-motion animated film, and The Jim Henson Company is helping him develop it. The project is set up at Netflix, and it has been a passion project for the filmmaker.

He previously shared that the film is not going to be a family friendly version of the story. Hell, I’m not even sure that the Disney version was family friendly! That movie was super dark! The filmmaker recently discussed his Pinocchio film with Variety and compared it to Frankenstein: and described it as a “brutalist fable.”

“To me, Pinocchio, very much like Frankenstein, is a blank canvas in which learning the curve of what the world is and what being human is are very attractive to do as a story. I’m very attracted to it because, thematically — and I don’t want to spoil what the movie’s about — it’s about something that is in all of my movies, which is choice. That’s a theme that is very dear to my heart. I think [earlier versions of] the story, and Collodi’s in particular, are very repressive. It’s essentially a very brutalist fable about what a sin disobedience is. And I think disobedience is the beginning of the will, and the beginning of choice. … I think there’s something that’s very attractive about seeing disobedience as a virtue, or as the beginning of a virtue.”

Yep, that certainly fits the themes that Del Toro likes to play with in the stories he tells. It makes sense that he would be attracted to a story like Pinocchio, and I’m curious to see how his version of the story plays out and also how it’s going to end up looking visually.

This isn’t the first time he’s compared Pinocchio to Frankenstein. He previously explained:

“He’s a creature that is created through unnatural means from a father that he then distances [himself] from, and has to learn about failure and pain and loneliness.”

When talking about the story, Del Toro previously shared, “In our story, Pinocchio is an innocent soul with an uncaring father who gets lost in a world he cannot comprehend. He embarks on an extraordinary journey that leaves him with a deep understanding of his father and the real world. I’ve wanted to make this movie for as long as I can remember.”

Pinocchio will be released on Netflix at some point in 2021.