Review: 'Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio,' gloriously done in stop-motion animation, is a dark and beautiful variation on a classic tale

Stop-motion is the artisan-crafted branch of the animation genre, and seldom is it as finely crafted as it is in “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a sumptuously dark and twisted take on the Carlo Collodi classic.

In this telling, the kindly woodcarver Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) is first shown in happy times, with his son, Carlo. But when Carlo is killed when a bombing run hits their village, during World War I, Geppetto is distraught. He buries Carlo next to the boy’s mother, and plants a tree over the grave. 

Some time later, when the tree falls, Geppetto carves a puppet from the wood — and that night, the Blue Fairy (voiced by Tilda Swinton) gives life to the puppet (voiced by Gregory Mann). The puppet-turned-boy also gets a conscience, in the form of one Sebastian J. Cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor), who also becomes our narrator.

Pinocchio’s first appearance in the village, during Sunday Mass, elicits screams from the townsfolk and a nasty sneer from the town’s Fascist prosecutor, Podesta (voiced by Ron Perlman). When Pinocchio declares that he’s not a puppet, his nose grows into a good-sized tree branch, a sign that when he lies, the evidence is clear.

Del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson, a veteran animator, throw Pinocchio through some familiar misadventures — including working for a greedy showman (voiced by Christoph Waltz) and being swallowed by a terrible sea creature. What’s new here, in a script del Toro co-wrote with “Adventure Time” scribe Patrick McHale, is that Pinocchio also has to contend with the realities of war and the rise of Benito Mussolini.

The animation is painstakingly created, the stop-motion figures are incredibly detailed, and the story carries a surprising amount of weight for this oft-told story. This is a version of “Pinocchio” that makes one believe that this boy is both completely wooden and completely real at the same time.

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‘Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, November 18, at some theaters; starts streaming December 9 on Netflix. Rated PG for dark thematic material, violence, peril, some rude humor and brief smoking. Running time: 117 minutes.