Like I Said. Eating Disney's Lunch.

I have to start by saying I haven't seen Disney's Pinocchio since I was a kid.  Even then I was never a huge fan of the story.  Still, like most children of the 70s, anything Disney was sort of an automatic classic in my house.  I had a record (remember them?) of the Pinocchio story and I saw it when it aired on television some time in my childhood.  

When I heard they were going to put Tom Hanks in a live action remake of that classic animated film, I totally, absolutely could not have cared an iota less.  

Around the time that Disney released that film, I stumbled across a behind the scenes video of Guillermo del Toro's upcoming stop-motion version of the story for Netflix and posted that here.  

This version of the story is simply gorgeous.  Stop motion animation is out of vogue thanks to computer animation, but it seems that it still has a place in cinema.  I would dearly love to see more of this kind of stuff from del Toro and the folks who made this masterpiece.

 

In a just world, we'd say "Disney made 2 versions of the del Toro classic."

 

To be clear, this is NOT the version of the story you saw in the Disney version.  It's more like a Grimm fairy tale than a Disney movie and that's a tone that fits the story better in my opinion.  Pinocchio isn't made from love but during a fit of drunken rage and grief.  He dies.  A LOT.  Geppetto isn't a perfectly kindly old toy maker but a bitter, grief stricken old man who doesn't quite know what to do with his creation.  The cricket has a pretty fun, Wile E. Coyote existence for some comic relief.

The story's fascist Italy setting is the capper, with Pinocchio winding up in a military academy rather than Pleasure Island, but the lesson is the same:  

Blindly following will only make an ass of you.

Disney could learn a few lessons here both from the story and the story-teller.  They won't, but they should.

"What happens, happens.  And then...we are gone."