Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Review

Guillermo del Toro announced this in 2008, watched it collapse in 2017 when no studio would pay for it, and saw Netflix revive it in 2018. Co-directed with the stop-motion veteran Mark Gustafson, it moves Collodi's story to Mussolini's Italy: Geppetto (David Bradley) carves the puppet in drunken grief for a son killed in a bombing raid, and the boy who wakes up is wild, rude and impossible to contain.

The craft is extraordinary. Pinocchio alone needed some 3,000 replacement faces, the wood looks carved rather than modeled, and the afterlife, ruled by Tilda Swinton's sphinx-like Death, is as strange as anything in del Toro's live action. Ewan McGregor's cricket supplies the comedy, Christoph Waltz's ringmaster and Ron Perlman's fascist official the menace, and Bradley's cracked, tender Geppetto the heart.

Alexandre Desplat's songs are the weak spot, pleasant and forgettable in a film otherwise full of sharp edges, and Manohla Dargis found the fascism metaphor politically incoherent. It still won the Oscar for animated feature, the first for a streaming service, and the critics who set it beside Pan's Labyrinth were not wrong.