Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) Review

Happy New Year’s Eve! Was going to end on a couple of horror movie reviews this year but quickly wrote the below for my Letterboxd so I guess I’ll end on this one instead since it’s one of the better movies I saw in 2022… 🙂

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022)

Directed by Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson

Based on The Adventures of Pinocchio
by Carlo Collodi

Starring: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Burn Gorman, Ron Perlman, John Turturro, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Tim Blake Nelson, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton

Music by Alexandre Desplat

Plot Synopsis: (via Wikipedia)
Loosely based on the 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, and strongly influenced by Gris Grimly’s illustrations for a 2002 edition of the book, it reimagines the story of Pinocchio, a wooden puppet who comes to life as the son of his carver Geppetto, as “a story of love and disobedience as Pinocchio struggles to live up to his father’s expectations, learning the true meaning of life” set in Fascist Italy during the interwar period and World War II.

My Opinion:

This was a very good adaptation with stunning stop-motion animation. I like the tale of Pinocchio & enjoyed getting much more of a story here than Disney gave us plus this film has a lot more heart & emotion than recent Disney movies & certainly much more than their live action Tom Hanks Pinocchio. But I’m probably in the minority in still liking Disney’s 1940 version the most as nothing can top the old Disney classics & songs such as When You Wish Upon A Star for me. With so many current movies being new adaptations or reboots or sequels of existing stories I already know, I get a little bored. I don’t want to take away from how good Guillermo del Toro‘s Pinocchio is, though. It’s great! I just always crave new-to-me stories.

Besides the amazing animation & strong characters, this also had a great main theme to its score which stayed with me for days & a good score always gives a movie bonus points for me. Also appreciated the del Toro style in so much of this, especially The Wood Sprite & her sister Death as they reminded me the most of Pan’s Labyrinth (still brilliant & easily his best film). Also really liked the look of Pinocchio himself, which put the live-action Disney version to shame. At the moment I think I can only recall one song but that’s fine since you’re not gonna beat the Disney Pinocchio songs. I preferred that the songs in this were unobtrusive & didn’t take away from the emotion of the story. Leave the big musical numbers to Disney as they know their stuff on that.

Still trying to decide where I’ll place this in my 2022 movie release rankings but it should easily be in the top five. It won’t be an all-time favorite film of mine but it’s certainly one of the better movies released in the past few disappointing years.

My Rating: 8/10

Fido (2006) Review

Fido (2006) Review

Directed by Andrew Currie

Starring:
Carrie-Anne Moss
Billy Connolly
Dylan Baker
Kesun Ray
Henry Czerny
Tim Blake Nelson

Running time: 91 minutes

Plot Synopsis: (via Wikipedia)
Fido is a 2006 Canadian zombie comedy film that takes place in a 1950s-esque alternate universe where radiation from space has turned the dead into zombies. In order to continue living normal lives, communities are fenced with the help of a governing corporation named Zomcon. Zomcon provides collars with accompanying remote controls to control the zombies’ hunger for flesh so as to use them as slaves or servants.

A bullied boy named Timmy befriends the zombie his mother has bought to be their household servant & names him ‘Fido’.

My Opinion:

I’ve been wanting to see this movie for years. I’m a big fan of zombie movies & enjoy a good zombie comedy. I’ve reviewed quite a few zomcoms on this blog & my favorite by far was The Return Of The Living Dead. Shaun Of The Dead is of course a classic now, Dead Snow was pretty fun, I kind of totally love Warm Bodies for some reason, and Life After Beth was a fairly big disappointment. Where does Fido rank? Well, I certainly liked it more than Life After Beth but it’s a pretty strange film. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting but I appreciate its uniqueness.

I loved that they set this in what appears to be the 1950s. Has there been another zombie movie set in this time period? It’s a great idea. It’s a cool contrast seeing stereotypical 1950’s perfect housewives using flesh-eating zombies as servants & knowing that those zombies will rip them apart if their remote-controlled domestication collars are removed. It’s like watching an episode of Leave It To Beaver with zombies. Actually, it reminded me a lot of The Stepford Wives (had that been a comedy – I’m not talking about that shitty remake that was supposedly a comedy but sucked and wasn’t funny).

Fido‘s concept is very clever and I understand that it’s satire but I’m not sure that it ever really lives up to its potential or makes its point. If it has a point? It’s not as obvious as the satire in a straightforward zombie film such as Romero’s Dawn Of The Dead but I suppose it’s maybe making a statement on corporations controlling the living just as the living control the undead with special collars? I don’t know. And although it’s a fun decade to explore as it’s so extremely different from nowadays, the 50’s satire thing has been done before and done better in plenty of other films. Still, it’s a fun movie and I really liked the setting.

Summary:

There’s not much else I can really say about Fido. I was hoping to like it more than I did as I’ve wanted to see it for ages but, overall, something about it didn’t really work for me. I loved the concept & the setting and thought the comedy worked fairly well. However, I didn’t think the characters were very strong and I lost interest a few times. I was hoping for more exploration of the main characters & their relationships with Billy Connolly’s Fido. Fido himself was disappointing as I suppose I was expecting a more loveable “Bub” type of zombie as in Day Of The Dead. In a way, I think it would have been better if they’d focused a little more on the zombies & their background stories. It’s a clever film but it’s another film that I felt like I “appreciated” more than actually enjoyed.

My Rating: 6/10