That irony is at the heart of del Toro’s distinctive Netflix take on the tale, which redefines both the setting and the morality of Collodi’s Pinocchio. He relocates the action to Mussolini’s Italy, and re-creates Pinocchio himself as an anarchic force who liberates the humans he meets, rather than learning to conform with them. It has much in common with del Toro’s Spanish-set horror movies The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, both of which present a child’s-eye view of midcentury fascism. “The three of them are about innocence and war, and dictatorships, fading or active, and how it trickles down into everyday life, or family, or a town, or a little church, or a little life,” del Toro says. “I think one of the themes that links Pan’s Labyrinth to Pinocchio directly is disobedience as a virtue - which is a real countermovement to the traditional story of Pinocchio, which is, ‘If you obey, you’ll become a real kid.’ In this, it’s ‘If you disobey, you will always have been real to yourself,’ you know?”Īsked why he keeps coming back to this era and this setting, del Toro reaches for a feeling he experienced in childhood: a fear and mistrust of the world that was no less deep for being inexplicable in the context of his comfortable life. “It was not normal, the amount of fear that I had as a kid, when I was in a time of peace, in a middle-class family. But I did feel it,” he says emphatically. “On the one hand, you’re handed the world of childhood, which is permeated by fairies and wishes and magical worlds. And on the other hand, you are interacting with a world of brutality and inhumanity, and you see it. I mean, it’s impossible for a kid not to see it. And everybody’s telling you things that you see them constantly not believing, or breaking the rules that they tell you you should obey.
This paradox is essential in how disorienting and scary childhood was for me.” Image: Netflixĭel Toro’s take on Pinocchio is just as concerned with what it means to be a parent as a child.
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