Pinocchio: First Reactions to Guillermo del Toro's Adaptation Surface Online

By Jamie Jirak

Last month, Disney+ released a new live-action Pinocchio starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto. The movie was met with poor reviews, earning a 26% critics score and a 30% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, Netflix is releasing its own version of Pinocchio, but this time it's a stop-motion project with Guillermo del Toro at the helm. The first reactions for this new version just hit the Internet after the movie's world premiere at the London Film Festival, and it looks like del Toro's version is fairing much better than the one made by Robert Zemeckis.

"Just saw @RealGDT's Pinocchio. Visually astonishing, dense with beautifully complex ideas about moral goodness, and an emotional ending that is truly sublime," Doctor Strange director, Scott Derrickson, tweeted. "Guillermo's PINOCCHIO is a masterpiece. Beautiful, surreal, brilliant. The last 5 minutes wrecked me. A wonderful meditation on love, mortality, and, as is common in Guillermo's work, being loved for who you are. Will be paired annually with FANTASTIC MR. FOX. A true delight," Derrickson's longtime collaborator and writer, C. Robert Cargill, added. 

"Just walking out of @RealGDT's extraordinary you-never-saw-nuthin-like-it #Pinocchio. It's an absolute masterpiece... probably the weirdest, wildest, wonderfullest stop-motion film ever made. It's gonna wallop your heart," author Joe Hill posted. "Guillermo del Toro's best movie in a decade is a stop-motion triumph," IndieWire wrote. "Guillermo del Toro puts his own heartfelt, yet dark twist on the classic tale of #Pinocchio. The visual and thematic language of the film is rich, meaningful and clearly made by Del Toro. Also, the stop-motion animation is a miracle of craftsmanship!" Discussing Film's Ben Rolph tweeted.

"GDT's Pinocchio, his finest film since Pan's Labyrinth, is a song of innocence and experience as beautiful and poetic as it is brooding and portentous. Boasting stunning stop-motion animation and cleverly framed as an imperfect father-and-son tale, I adored every last frame," Empire Magazine's Jordan King shared. "I am in love. Pinocchio is Guillermo Del Toro at the peak of his storytelling powers. He breathes new life into the old wooden tale. A near-perfect creation of stop-motion animation, fantasy, musical, and fairytale. The most adult family film I've seen since Petite Maman," Luke Hearfield tweeted.

Who Stars in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio?

Pinocchio is del Toro's first animated feature and stars Ewan McGregor as Sebastian J. Cricket, the cricket who lives in Pinocchio's wooden heart and serves as the film's storyteller. Del Toro teams with the Jim Henson Company and ShadowMachine on the stop-motion animation take on Carlo Collodi's novel, which follows a puppet boy who comes to life. With McGregor, the voice cast also includes David Bradley as Geppetto, Gregory Mann as Pinocchio, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, and Burn Gorman, with Christoph Waltz and Tilda Swinton.

Pinocchio debuts in theaters in November and on Netflix in December.

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