Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) is a dark-fantasy stop-motion film you can watch online on iFILM. Del Toro and Mark Gustafson rebuild Carlo Collodi's tale from the ground up and drop it into Italy under Mussolini.

Grieving the loss of his son, the old woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley) hacks a new boy out of a pine log. A wood spirit breathes life into the carving, and Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) wakes up — wooden, willful, and unable to die. He runs off with Count Volpe's traveling show (Christoph Waltz), dodges a fascist recruiter, and keeps circling back to a father slowly learning to love the strange child he made. A cricket named Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan McGregor) narrates it all.

Every puppet here was moved by hand, frame by frame, and the work won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The voice cast includes Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Ron Perlman and John Turturro, with a score by Alexandre Desplat. At nearly two hours, the film treats death and acceptance as real subjects, with no sugared ending. Stream Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) online on iFILM.