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Guillermo del Toro's 'Pinocchio' Is About Life, Death and Mussolini

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Guillermo del Toro remembers seeing Walt Disney’s animated version of Pinocchio with his mom as a kid. He found the story compelling because of the frightening situations the wooden puppet, who comes to life but yearns to be a real boy, gets caught up in.
Pinocchio gets kidnapped. He is forced to perform in a traveling show. And he must rescue his “father,” the woodcarver Geppetto, from the belly of an evil whale named Monstro.
“It was the first time I saw somebody understand how scary childhood was to me,” del Toro said last month at a San Francisco showing of his version of Pinocchio at the nonprofit SFFilm’s event to honor the director’s work. “I said, ‘That’s how it feels to be a kid.'”
Decades later, the Oscar-winning director of imaginative films including Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water decided to pitch a new version of the story. It took 10 to 15 years to get funding because every major studio turned him down. He laughs when he explains why. 
“I would come in and I would say it’s about death and life and the rise of Mussolini. And they would validate my parking and send me on my merry way.” 
That is, until Netflix decided to greenlight del Toro’s vision for Pinocchio, which airs on the streaming service starting Friday. Del Toro thanked Netflix and other services for greenlighting TV series and movies that more traditional studios pass on. 
As for Pinocchio, this version takes inspiration from the original 1883 story by Italian writer Carlo Collodi, with the setting transposed to the 1930s against the backdrop of the rise of Italian fascism. 
We meet Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) as he mourns the accidental death of his cherished son, Carlo. One night, in a wine-fueled flurry of grief and rage, Geppetto chops down a large pine tree – which happens to be the newly adopted home of a world-traveling cricket with literary aspirations – and carves it into a marionette of a young boy. 
An otherworldly spirit (Tilda Swinton) takes pity on the poor old man, and, after Geppetto has fallen into bed, magically grants the puppet life. She assigns the disgruntled insect, Sebastian J.

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