Review of Pinoccio

I was surprisingly touched by this, which doesn't feel entirely like a children's film. It's a bit darker than the Disney Pinoccio, even though I have a memory of finding bits of that really menacing as a child. This is beautiful to look at, with backgrounds that look much more like traditional paintings than CGI landscapes. It's at least partly done with stop-motion puppet animation rather than CGI, and some of the puppets are brilliant to look at.

It's also very much an anti-fascist Pinoccio, set in 1920s and then wartime Italy, with Mussolini posters and fascist slogans on the walls, and a sinister fascist official in the village. It's not a sophisticated critique of fascist ideology or purpose, but at least the bad guys are recognisably historical bad guys rather than just all-purpose tyrants.

It felt to me like there were a few big ideas in there too, like the sweetness of human life coming from the knowledge that we are mortal - Pinoccio is reborn each time he dies, after a brief spell in a gloomy bardo populated with card-playing, Yiddish-inflected rabbits. And there is quite a lot about relations between fathers and sons, which got to me too.

And I noted in passing that one of the places visited by the travelling puppet show to which Pinoccio is seduced is Alessandria, outside Torino...which reminded me of my odd work trip there back in the 1980s, and convinced me that I ought to write up the memory of it.

Watched on Netflix.