“Such terrible, terrible joy”: the anti-fascism of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Originally posted to my Patreon on December 17, 2022. Now that the movie has an Oscar, this seems like an appropriate time to post it. Please back my Patreon to support my work.

My nonna was born in Vicenza, about 40 miles west of Venice, in what seemed to be the dying days of Italian Fascism. She was one year old when the Allies bombed Vicenza, targeting strategic locations but killing around a thousand civilians. My nonna’s brother rescued her from the rubble of their bombed house. He was a toddler at the time.

In the early 1960s, my nonna, a woman of 20, left Italy with her two young sons. When she arrived in the United States, she spoke hardly a word of English, raising her boys alone while her husband (a Green Beret of the U.S. Army) slept with every woman under the son. The marriage didn’t last — Nonna married an Air Force officer some years later, trading in her family name Salvarese for Kelley.

As a third generation American, my connection to my Italian family history was mediated through family anecdotes and media. Disney’s Pinocchio was probably the first vaguely Italian movie I saw. The still abjectly frightening scene where the boys on Pleasure Island transform into donkeys might be my earliest life memory, a fact which probably explains a lot about me. While the 1940 movie largely glides around its source material’s basis in Italian culture (no small part, the donkey scene preserves a key part of Carlo Collodi’s tremendously disturbing book in which Pinocchio murders the Cricket who has lived in his house for 100 years. The Italian words for donkey — asino, somaro, ciuco — are polysemous, referring not merely to animals but to lazy students and — paradoxically — people who work themselves to death, with the underlying understanding that poverty sucks, but that hard work and school are ways to avoid it. 

While Disney avoided explicitly referring to Italy in the Mussolini era, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio embraces its source material’s Italian heritage in the age of Giorgia Melloni. It’s an explicitly Italian film, with characters shouting “arrivederci” and having names like Spazzaturra (which means “trash”). It’s also unequivocally anti-fascist, as del Toro always is, trotting out Fascist nightmares as the death of family and wonder. Mussolini even gets a cameo, voiced by none other than Tom fucking Kenny.

Yet despite its independence from previous Pinocchios, the del Toro film is keenly aware of its debts to the Disney film. It’s a musical, its setting in Fascist Italy is a nod to when the original film was produced, and Ewan MacGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket (a perfect boy for whom I will die) serves as a narrator like Jimmy Cricket. Del Toro looks at Disney’s template, plucks bits from it, and goes “OK, I’m going to plug my own anti-fascist weirdness into this.”

Del Toro’s anti-fascism is unique to this Pinocchio. Le avventure di Pinocchio predated Mussolini’s rise to power, while the original Disney film elided the issue altogether. Del Toro responds to both works by setting itself in roughly the era when the Disney film was produced. Its placement of the story in 1930s Fascist Italy is an innovation, befitting the director of the devoutly anti-Francoist Pan’s Labyrinth. 

Collodi and Disney would never have made Gepetto an alcoholic bereaved father whose child is accidentally killed in an air raid (well, Collodi might have, but World War I was a bit after his time). The thought of my nonna trapped in the rubble of her own house during an Allied bombing is far from Disney’s conception of Gepetto’s generically Alpine little village. But del Toro’s heart is always with the downtrodden and weird.

Del Toro’s changes aren’t cynical. Gepetto’s loss of his son is played as a tragedy rather than a doom bell for family. The movie plays war and family as destructive forces that can be healed through emotional honesty and the difficult labor of conscientious family. Remarkably, it does this without being sanctimonious or too brutal for children. Pinocchio is a protagonist whose literal “born yesterday” nature makes him a perfect engine for exploring the confusing dynamics of living up to a parent’s expectations while learning exactly what the world is. Unlike the Disney character, who’s largely a reactive recipient events, or even Collodi’s selfish little anarchist, this Pinocchio is a sweet little disaster, an agent of his own story who negotiates with the nature of life and death.

Ultimately, all the major versions of Pinocchio share a sense of weird horror. The profoundly disturbing book, in which the protagonist routinely dies and is resurrected, is such strange source material that even Disney had to make a scary children’s move out of it. Del Toro’s Pinocchio is a cute little puppet, but he’s fundamentally uncanny and off-putting even within the uncanny and off-putting medium of stop-motion. Claymation is simply a perfect form for this tale (seriously, watch the behind-the-scenes feature Netflix put out on this), highlighting the innate strangeness of the source material and its story.

Ultimately, this synthesis of weirdness and benevolence is where del Toro’s Pinocchio trumps its antecedents. It dodges the dogmatic status quo propaganda of Disney’s version while eliding Collodi’s bizarre misanthropy. It’s a paean to families and strangeness. Ultimately, fascism is a nightmare that destroys innocent love and profound magic.

This one hits a little hard. My nonna became increasingly hard-right over the years as she watched 12 hours of Fox News a day. One time she pointed to a typo in a Fox chyron and said “a Black person did that!” before launching into a tirade about how Black people can’t spell. Sometimes she would tell me that Donald Trump’s IQ is so significant that we peasants couldn’t understand him. Ultimately, Nonna cut me out after I transitioned, telling me “you killed our grandson.” I regrettably failed to retort with “yes, and guess who’s next?”

Nonna and Pinocchio were both vital parts of my childhood. One turned to fascism, while the other spawned a movie about how Mussolini and his ilk unambiguously need to die. When I watched del Toro’s Pinocchio, I felt like a little part of my childhood had been restored, like there were things to celebrate in that dark era of my life. I can hardly think of anti-fascism more worthwhile: art that heals the lowly. Obviously this movie won’t take down Melloni any more than Collodi defeated the Kingdom of Italy or Disney shot Mussolini, but I’ve learned to take small victories where I can. The past is a huge place, and sometimes, pleasant little futures emerge from it.