I’m so glad the Guillermo Del Toro Pinocchio movie is being received really well, because it was literally my most anticipated movie of the year! So here’s some fun facts about the crew, concept, and production that got me excited about this movie and that I think would excite much of tumblr as well:
-the screenplay was cowritten by Del Toro and Patrick McHale, creator of Over The Garden Wall and a writer on Adventure Time.
-the movie was codirected by Mark Gustasfon, who was the animation director of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)
-the primary art/animation designers of this movie (production designer Curt Enderle, art director Robert DeSue, character designer Georgina Hayns, animation supervisor Brian Leif Hansen, and photography director Frank Passingham) previously worked on projects that include Coraline, the Corpse Bride, Paranorman, Isle of Dogs, Frankenweenie, Kubo, and Chicken Run.
-Besides Netflix, it was produced by the Henson company (always a good sign when you’re doing anything with puppets) and ShadowMachine, who have produced a lot of Adult Swim shows including Robot Chicken, Moral Orel, and Tuca and Bertie, as well as the Netflix original BoJack Horseman.
-Del Toro was inspired to make this adaptation due to the similarities he’d always noticed between the original Pinocchio story and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Both are about a man-made character’s relationship with his father/creator, and his attempts to understand what it means to be human. This inspiration is why the film takes on a gothic feel at times.
-the movie is over 10 years in the making. Del Toro announced the project in 2008 and production began in 2012, but it went into development hell and no further updates were made for several years. Del Toro has described it as his passion project, saying “I’ve wanted to make this movie for as long as I can remember.”
-the backdrop of Mussolini’s Italy was intended to show how Pinnochio was able to find his own humanity and will in a time where everyone else was acting like a blindly obedient puppet. Del Toro wanted to deviate from the original book’s themes of obeying authority by making his Pinocchio virtuous for questioning the rules and forging his own set of morals. (Also if you know anything about Del Toro, the guy likes to dunk on fascism.)
-Del Toro didn’t feel the need to have Pinocchio become flesh-and-blood at the end of the movie, saying all you need to be a real human is to behave like one.
I was lucky enough to see this movie in 35 mm in a movie theatre on Thanksgiving weekend. If there are any movie theatre showings near you and you’re in a position to be able to attend them, I would totally recommend it especially if you can go with loved ones. It was a gorgeous, heartwarming, and magical movie to experience on a big screen and perfect for the late fall/winter holiday season.
Sorry to all of the people who had to flee book Twitter because of Elon. I can simulate it for you right here though!
Author who wrote a YA book called something like “Crown of Suck and Bone”: I wish I could put my English teacher down with a bolt gun for making me read Shakespeare instead of REAL literature like Love Simon in high school
Former Ana Mardoll reply guy: This. LITERALLY this. Expecting people like me, who have synesthesia, to read Shakespeare is rooted in
Person whose profile pic is Dostoevsky w/ huge naturals: I hope the world blows up tomorrow
Disappointing.
Started out with a strong premise. “Crown of Suck and Bone” caught my attention. However, after that the work devolves into more of the same tired “classics vs YA” stuff. Which, as I have already implied, has potential, as YA authors and the series they produce provide a lot of material on account of being very silly and highly pompous. But this is just outdated low-quality strawmen. Who are we making fun of? It’s like the twitter/tumblr version of cheap references to other media in comedy movies.
I’m not particularly satisfied with the punchline, either. I wish Huge Naturals Dostoyevsky had something funnier, meaner, and more original to say.
Your blog exists because you once went to a comedy show and wanted desperately to heckle a comedian so well you’d be featured in a moderately-successful Youtube short, but you lost your nerve because the guy onstage made a joke about people who have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and it hit too close to home. Somewhere else on this site, you have a main account on which you’ve attempted humor exactly like this post in the past and failed to blow up. This place is your refuge. You can speak your mind here without fear of retaliation by surfclown or were–ralph.
I like you. I think you would have been really into Allen Ginsberg if you grew up in the 60s. Slide into my DMs.
*explaining kitchen appliances to my pet medieval knights* The microwave, or Micheal the Wavious, and metal fork, or Sir Silver Prong, are sworn enemies and can never cross paths lest their meeting spell destruction for all.
Pop culture reduces It’s a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn’t exist and a little girl saying, “Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.” A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.
But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He’s not just standing there moping about, “My friends don’t like me,” like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George’s life has been destroyed. He’s bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we’ve been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he’s worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.
That’s dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future’s not worth living, but that his past wasn’t worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.
This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it’s absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It’s there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war–but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter’s domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won–but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren’t for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire’s wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she’d have been a spinster isn’t, “Ha ha, she’d have been pathetic without you.” It’s showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George’s existence didn’t stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn’t a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn’t a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.
Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu’s saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence’s story–showing that even George’s despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.
If this movie has light and hope, it’s not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It’s just about as realistic as it gets.
it’s so bizarre when animated American films are set in a certain location and then only certain characters have the accents of that place. It makes no damn sense!! like
WHY IS SHE MORE FRENCH THAN THE REST OF THEM???
WHY ARE THESE GUYS MORE SCOTTISH THAN THE KIDS??
(also, aren’t they Vikings or something?)
To be fair, almost everyone in Ratatouille does have a French accent. The real question is why Linguini and also all the rats sound intensely American
If it was just the rats I’d say it’s because the movie can be interpreted to mean that the rats understand but don’t necessarily speak human languages so the rat dialog isn’t literally taking place the way we see it but that doesn’t explain why Linguini has a rat accent
LINGUINI HAS A RAT ACCENT
Do we ever hear like
For sure that Linguini grew up in France tho?
It could be possible he’s just an American immigrant
I mean his name is Alfredo Linguini so I always assumed he was Italian
I’m sorry his first name is Alfredo?
What
ALFREDO???
he’s American you guys his mother was American it was mentioned in the beginning
I’m sorry, I’ve moved on to the fact his mother was going through her cupboard for baby names
Alfredo was a name before it was a sauce let’s go over the movie from the top again
This is Alfredo di Lelio (right) the inventor of fettuccine Alfredo, he’d come out to the table and make it in front of you by hand
The chap on the left is an airport
I think you might have your left and right mixed up, my friend
