Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio: Texture and Mortality.

by Oliver Spicer.

Pinocchio's nose growing in Del Toro's Pinocchio Trailer, 2022, Netflix.

Guillermo del Toro’s new adaptation of Pinocchio(2022) for Netflix is what we would expect from the horror-centric director: a sinister retelling that resembles the dark fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm more than its Disney counterpart.

Like many of his other works, the film uses a distinctive aesthetic (the overall look and atmosphere) to tell the story of a puppet that comes to life. Yet its form of stop-motion animation allows an even more potent emphasis on aesthetic than the chiaroscuro lighting of Cronos(1993), the mix of warm and cold colour temperatures in Pan’s Labyrinth(2006), or even the gritty visuals of Hellboy(2004) - as there is a more complete control over the style of what appears on screen due to the arduous process of animation and the intricately sculpted characters and sets in the case of stop-motion.

Therefore what Del Toro chooses to do with this complete power over visuals is very significant: to promote the texture of every element on-screen - with character designs, animation style, and even the themes of the narrative being centred around texture.

Texture of materials...

This prominence of texture is most obviously shown through the appearance of the characters, props, and locations in the film:

Pinocchio himself is a strong example of this, his whole body covered in a course wood grain with cracks and twigs to add further texture. This is expected due to his wooden composition, but it is also true for the human characters such as the carpenter Geppetto whose large grey beard is sturdy and solid with thick strands that appear more like roots than human hair. Sebastian J. Cricket (a copyright free version of Disney’s Jimminy Cricket who lives inside Pinocchio's heart and acts as his conscious) is another highly-textured character despite his miniature size, with purple and blue iridescent wings that shine in the light along with the tiny bumps and scratches on his exo-skeleton. Whether human, animal, supernatural being, or somehow sentient object all the characters in Del Toro’s Pinocchio have a highly textural quality.

Pinocchio and Geppetto in Del Toro's Pinocchio Trailer, 2022, Netflix.

Each location of the film can also be read as embodying a specific texture, which also links to its narrative purpose. Geppetto’s house and workshop is entirely wooden, creating a cosy atmosphere as well as a material connection between Pinocchio and the space he was ‘birthed’ from. The town which rejects our protagonist as an outcast is built into a jagged mountain range, with a mass of buildings made from its stone that create an angular and unwelcoming tone to mirror their lack of heart. Even the depiction of the afterlife in the film is textural, visualised as an endless sea of midnight-blue sand - a metaphor for the ending of time itself through connotations of sand-timers that also appear in the film.

The afterlife in Del Toro's Pinocchio Trailer, 2022, Netflix.

For the broader genre of stopmotion animation, this focus on texture is not uncommon. Real animal fur gives the characters of Fantastic Mr Fox (Wes Anderson, 2009) highly detailed faces and bodies, with the fur drawn attention to by random movements caused by the animation process which are a purposeful homage back to early stop motion such as King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) that suffered from similar unpredictable motion. The LEGO Movie(Phil Lord & Chris Miller,2014) (which although not stop motion tries to resemble it) uses dust, fingerprints, and scratches on its plastic characters to create a homemade look to also reference back, but here to the independent stop-motion LEGO animations on YouTube. Stopmotion is a form that naturally lends itself to textured images, as the process of taking one photo at a time enables each frame to be in perfect focus with no motion blur - making textures more prominent than live-action film.

Yet it would be an incomplete to say that this textural emphasis is solely created through the puppets and sets, as the motion of the characters is also heavily stylised to contribute to the aesthetic of texture.

Texture of time...

Animating some sequences on ‘twos’ first contributes to the textured movements in the film, which is the process of only moving the character ever other frame - meaning the motion is essentially shot at 12 frames per second compared to the smoother 24 frames when shot on ‘Ones’. This choice is normally done to slash down the high production costs and time of animation - but here it gives a hand crafted feeling to the movements, a textural quality of motion by making time itself courser since every other frame is skipped. Purposefully shooting on ‘twos’ for aesthetic reasons has become popular recently, with Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse (Peter Ramsey & Bob Persichetti & Rodney Rothman, 2018) noticeably combining the technique with pop-art visuals to create a comic book feel that brings energy and character to the superhuman movements.

Train leacing a station in Del Toro's Pinocchio Trailer, 2022, Netflix.

Yet this is not the total answer to why the movements feel textural, as few scenes are shot entirely on ‘twos’. In fact, there are shots in the film such as when the circus train leaves the station with a crowd cheering below in which different frame rates are used for each elements, with the smooth motion of the frame animated on ‘ones’ and the crowd shot on ‘twos’. This calls attention to the coarseness of the motion, but still does not completely make up the textural quality.

The previous theory is then incomplete, but there is still a ragged nature to the motion of the characters that needs to be explained. This is then achieved by the movements of the characters being slow and subtle, which gives the animators less margin of error to create a smooth motion. If a movement is fast then there are less frames needed to depict it, meaning the brain can fill in the rest of the animation. But the slow motions used in the film means there is less of the imagined motion by the audience and the animator must be accurate to an impossible degree. Shaming the animators for being imprecise is not the purpose of this argument, as by utilising slower movements to contribute to the aesthetic the degree to which they understand about animation has been revealed and the task of elevating the visuals and narrative through style has been achieved.

Why Texture?

The choice of animation and visual style can then be said to have a strong focus on texture. We may wonder why this choice was made by Del Toro: its handcrafted feel might be a reflection of the narrative dealing with ideas about creation with the character of Geppetto the carpenter, or the hyper-realistic materials may be attempting to place the spectator in the mind of Pinocchio by re-seeing the world in which they live through the gaze of childhood curiosity (backed up by a scene in which the recently created wooden boy asks the words and uses of Geppetto’s tools in the form of a song), or it could even be brushed off as trying to visually distinguish itself from previous versions of Pinocchio - including the recently released ‘live-action’ Disney version that acts as its competition.

But when dealing a director with a terrifying back-catalogue like Del Toro we must look for a more sinister interpretation: one that links the focus on texture to one of the many themes of the story, mortality.

Mortality

Geppetto at his son's grave in Del Toro's Pinocchio Trailer, 2022, Netflix.

Mortality is at the core of this retelling of Pinocchio, which begins with Geppetto losing his only son in an air-raid on the Italian town. The grief stricken carpenter then carves Pinocchio from a tree beside the grave of his son in a scene that transcribes the ‘instruments of creation’ as described in Frankenstein to hammer and chisel when a new son is carved out from the timber. Pinocchio's existence (after he is gifted a soul by something between a fairy and a multi-eyed biblically accurate angel) is thus a defiance of death itself through his reincarnated purpose of Geppetto’s son and existence as an object that can walk, talk, and feel. Narratively, this is further explored in a scene in the afterlife where it is explained that since Pinocchio's soul is ‘borrowed’ he can never truly die. However although this may seem ideal to many, his main desire and the driving force behind his decisions is to become ‘real’ and follow the path of human-ness through becoming mortal.

Here, we can see how Geppetto’s aim to recreate life through the inanimate and the process of film align. Specifically animation can be seen as transforming objects into emotional beings that tell a story, which is shown well in mainstream Pixar animation such as Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) and Cars (John Lasseter, 2006) that humanise the inanimate to the point of inducing tears in the audience. To more fully understand this relationship between mortality and the recreation of life in the medium of film, an essay titled i>‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’ by French film critic Andre Bazin can be analysed.

Enter Bazin...

In the essay Bazin claims that photography ‘embalms time’ and is a mechanical prevention of death itself, evolved from previous cultural artforms such as the mummification of Egyptian pharaohs to the portraits of European royalty to preserve their legacy. Photography through objectively re-creating reality is described as the ultimate triumph over mortality, preserving the living like no other previous artform.

This reality is also described to have a textural quality by the film-philosopher Bazin, with the objectivity of cameras removing certain preconceptions that would otherwise be in the image - revealing the ‘spiritual dust and grime’ of the objects in frame. Unlike painting where reality first has to be interpreted to be recreated, filming and photography keeps flaws that may otherwise be overlooked (or ignored to keep less pretty royalty happy). Of course there is an argument that special effects can manipulate an image, but the addage that ‘the camera does not lie’ is still magnitudes more true when compared to the inherent translation of images in fine art - which also applies to the flaws in materials which can be seen as their textural quality.

Geppetto has then exceeded this goal of cinema by truly recreating the reality of his son in the form of Pinocchio, with the hyperreal style of texture in the film also showing how film can highlight and even emphasise the flaws in materials and the structures of the real world.

Imperfection: The Missing Link

notable writer S J Cricket Del Toro's Pinocchio Trailer, 2022, Netflix.

The focus on texture and the theme of mortality can only be seen as loosely related due to the previous arguments. However, the opening line of the theatrical trailer then can be used to show how intimately the two are truly related: with Sebastian J. Cricket introducing the story as being about ‘Imperfect fathers and imperfect boys’. This is an accurate summary of the film, as much of the actual conflict in the narrative centers on the paternal relationship between Pinocchio and his carpenter father Geppetto. Pinocchio can be read as an ‘Imperfect boy’ due to his lack of human-ness, but also his disobedience when he ignores the orders of his father to go to school and instead joins the circus which he is later also disobedient to. Whilst Gipetto is an ‘Imperfect father’ due his beration of Pinocchio for this disobedience, and his initial rejection of the wooden-boy due to his grief over his real child.

This point on ‘Imperfection’ being an over-arching theme can be used to link together texture and mortality in the film. As previously explored, texture can be said to be comprised of imperfections - formed from scratches and growing marks that define the material of an object. And through this lens, mortality can be seen as the ultimate imperfection of life - the fact that one day it ends.

But for both texture and morality these things are shown to define life. A thing (both object and person) is shown to be living through its texture, both through the marks that it has amassed over its lifespan through being exposed to the elements and injured and through the marks it obtains from its growth such as the rings of a tree. The imperfections of a material is what gives it a sense of life, which can also be applied to mortality - as it is shown in the film that life is giving meaning due to its ultimate end. In relation to the aims of Pinocchio and his distress can also be understood through the lack of imperfection in the fact he cannot die, with philosopher Bernard Williams describing how “Immortality, or a state without death, would be meaningless… so in a sense, death gives the meaning to life”.

In philosophical standards this is a simplified reduction of the complex nature of life and meaning, but it still leads to a powerful message to the film. Imperfection creates life in both texture and morality, and the acceptance of imperfection is essential - just as Pinocchio must accept the flawed nature of being human and Geppetto must accept the disobedient nature of his wooden faux son.

by Oliver Spicer, November 2022.