Part of the reason he kept getting a hard “no” is that he was seeking an unequivocal “yes.” Digital animation was en vogue, but del Toro insisted that his Pinocchio be old-school stop-motion, which could be as costly as it was time-consuming. Storywise, his premise was admittedly nuanced and unusual. It didn’t help del Toro’s cause that more conventional Pinocchios kept being made by others: Italy’s 2019 live-action version with Roberto Benigni as Geppetto; the bargain-bin Russian-made Pinocchio: A True Story, with Pauly Shore voicing the puppet boy, which was ridiculed on TikTok for its terrible production values; and Disney’s own glossy, live-action remake of its 1940 film, with Tom Hanks playing Geppetto and Robert Zemeckis at the helm. None of those movies really caught on, but none of them were as creatively innovative or ambitious as del Toro’s vision.
Our new wooden boy is hewn from a tree that grows over the grave of Geppetto’s son, who was accidentally killed by an errant World War I bomb. That adds an undercurrent of loss to the story, a sadness that contrasts its silliness and joys; it’s always there, tugging at the mind, like a sorrowful memory. Del Toro thought that would resonate for both kids and grown-ups. “What I like about Pinocchio is it can have a beautiful effect in the dialogue between a parent and a child, no matter how old the child is,” he says. “I mean you can be 50 and want to call your parents after seeing the movie. I’m fine with that. Or you can simply feel the understanding of how hard it is to be seen in a relationship between parents and kids. For both sides, by the way.”
“There’s a difference, for me, between creating a movie for kids and creating a movie that kids can watch,” he adds. “When people say they create them for kids, they really create them for parents. They create them by childproofing the outlets in the house. It’s basically a subgenre of parent-catered movies, babysitter movies, which become the bread and butter of the industrial-sized production of animation. My hope is that when kids watch this movie, they have questions and the parents are willing to listen and answer.”
Animator Sergio Valdivia on one of Pinocchio’s
many intricate sets.Gilberto Torres / Netflix
The hardest thing for executives to accept? That the movie would be set during Mussolini’s rise in the 1930s. Few kid-friendly movies tackle what it’s like to live in a time of nascent fascism, but del Toro had ideas he wanted to get across about the dangers of playing follow the leader. His Pinocchio might be an actual puppet, but he thinks for himself, unlike the venal bystanders who are flesh and blood but fall into lockstep with authority.
Del Toro cracks a devilish smile when discussing the other things that inspired the litany of “no, thank yous.” In the first version he proposed, “the fairy with the blue hair was the spirit of a dead girl that was in the same cemetery as Carlo, the dead son of Geppetto,” the director says. When he tried a second time, the ghost girl was gone, but she was replaced by something closer to the final version: two haunting, angel-like beings. The pitch didn’t go over any better. “It got only weirder when I said, ‘Now, it’s two sisters, life and death, that have a dialogue with Pinocchio,’” del Toro says. “It didn’t get any more accessible. Normally, the studios like their animated movies to be a lot more able to be tested in a family atmosphere, like a mall, and score really well—and this was not that.”
After all of Hollywood passed twice over, del Toro decided to seek money internationally to fund his Pinocchio, but he did not find enough takers there either. He publicly released some concept art in 2012, hoping to tantalize both investors and the public, and at times a production company would sign on to refine the idea further, but it never got a greenlight. In 2017, during interviews to promote his Netflix animated series Trollhunters, del Toro announced that Pinocchio was no longer moving forward.
Del Toro thinks people overlook how downright terrifying some sequences of Walt Disney’s Pinocchio can be—Monstro the whale, for instance, lives up to the name, and then some. “When people say ‘Disney-fy,’ they forget that actually Walt Disney understood that every fable needed an undercurrent of darkness,” he says. “We were with Quentin Tarantino in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and he said onstage, ‘Bambi is the most violent movie I ever saw,’ and Bambi is the only movie where I left the theater because I couldn’t take it anymore. I was crying. But Disney understood that in order to have the beauty and the humor and the laughter, you needed an undercurrent of darkness.”
Ultimately, what saved Pinocchio was Trollhunters, a story about a realm of monsters who protect the human world. Not only was that series a hit for Netflix, but it spun off two popular shows, the alien-themed 3Below and the sorcery saga Wizards: “I had an impeccable relationship with them, so I said, ‘Let me pitch it to Ted Sarandos, and who knows?’ And, as it happened with Trollhunters, Ted said yes in the room right then.”
In those boom times for Netflix, Sarandos agreed to all of del Toro’s terms: the story, the stop-motion animation, even the heartbreaking final shot. The director says he received an email from Netflix execs with only three notes. Two of them he agreed with, but the other one—regarding that ending—he didn’t. His reply, he says, amounted to: “Yes, yes, no.”
Now, del Toro can only feel vindicated. Pinocchio debuted at number two on Netflix’s movie chart, with 28 million hours watched in its first week, just a million shy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Love for the movie is overflowing on social media. “This is a movie that was really willed into existence by the fact that I try to not think that any movie is dead,” del Toro says. “I have movies that have been with me for 20 years that haven’t been made, and I’m okay. I have other movies that have been with me for 28 years and haven’t gotten made.” Now, he can legitimately add: not yet, anyway.
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