"Pinocchio" and "My Father's Dragon"

I want to talk about Guillermo Del Toro's "Pinocchio" and Nora Twomey's "My Father's Dragon" together, since they're both recent adaptations of beloved children's literature.  Conveniently, they're also both animated films released by Netflix.  

I'm more familiar with the "My Father's Dragon" books, written by Ruth Stiles, and was looking forward to the first English language adaptation (a very faithful anime version was made in 1997).  What I got was much darker than I was expecting.  Elmer Elevator (Jacob Tremblay) is a little boy, who with his mother (Golshifteh Farahani), faces hard times when their shop is closed down and they're forced to move to a big city.  Elmer goes on an adventure to rescue a dragon named Boris (Gaten Matarazzo), who is being held captive by a group of animals, who want him to help save their sinking island.  Aside from Elmer going to rescue Boris and a few minor details, none of this has anything to do with the books.  On the one hand, I understand that Stiles' books only offered a very simple, uncomplicated adventure story with characters who were likewise very one-dimensional.  Additional material was absolutely to be expected for an adaptation.  Also, the books are over 70 years old, and needed some updating.

On the other hand, a story I loved for being charming and funny and endearing has been entirely subsumed by something much more complicated and serious and emotionally fraught.  Taken on its own, the "My Father's Dragon" movie is perfectly good children's entertainment.  The animation from Cartoon Saloon is lovely, the star studded cast delivers good performances, and the screenplay by Meg LeFauve is solid and clearly very well intentioned.  However, I just can't get over the extreme tonal change.  There have been other adaptations, like Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox," and Mark Osborne's "The Little Prince," that have taken children's stories in more adult directions without losing their whimsy and lightheartedness.  "My Father's Dragon" has been so fundamentally changed in adaptation, so burdened with manufactured gravitas that much of the joy has been sapped out of the story.  I eventually had to just think of the leads as entirely different characters to get through the movie.  

It was hard to explain why this bothered me so much until I saw Guillermo Del Toro's long awaited stop-motion animated "Pinocchio."  Del Toro also makes some significant changes to the original Carlo Collodi story.  The tone is now much darker, with the story set in Fascist Italy.  New themes and new motivations for many characters have been introduced, and the film begins with the Cricket (Ewan McGregor) introducing us to the woodcarver Gepetto (David Bradley) and his young son Carlo (Gregory Mann), who soon dies tragically.  In this version of "Pinocchio," a grieving Gepetto creates his living puppet boy son (also Mann) in a drunken frenzy, and struggles to parent him.  Further adventures include Pinocchio being conscripted into Mussolini's army, and multiple trips to the underworld to meet with Death (Tilda Swinton).  One of the new characters is a mistreated monkey, Spazzatura, who doesn't actually speak, but Cate Blanchette is still credited with voicing him.         

I've seen a lot of warnings being relayed to concerned parents that this version of "Pinocchio" is not for small children, but nothing here strikes me as especially inappropriate.  The business with the Fascists is only worrisome if you understand who the Fascists were, and Pinocchio can't die despite all the damage he suffers.  Furthermore, all of the adaptations of "Pinocchio" I've ever seen have had similar amounts of alarming imagery and troubling existential concepts.  Even the recent Robert Zemeckis version, despite watering down the content to the point of absurdity, couldn't entirely escape the story's dark, psychological underpinnings about parenthood, morality, and learning how to be a good person in a terrible world.  

In short, Guillermo Del Toro's "Pinocchio" may be darker than most adaptations, but it's very true to the spirit of the original work.  The stop-motion animation, featuring wonderfully intricate puppets and a gorgeous production design, is a touch rougher than what we see out of Aardman or Laika.  It has a very handmade feel that fits perfectly with the ephemeral, but often monstrous nature of the characters.  The story wisely doesn't foreground its more adult content, sticking to the basic formula of Pinocchio getting into trouble, over and over, and having to deal with the consequences.  It helps that this Pinocchio is very much a bratty child at first, and only becomes a selfless hero over time.  There are plenty of funny moments to balance out the intensity, and the most profound bits of the script are often in throwaway dialogue you might miss if you're not paying attention.

My only real complaint about "Pinocchio" is that there are a few songs in the first half that feel mostly perfunctory.  Otherwise, it's clear this was Del Toro's passion project and he didn't compromise an inch.        

---