Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
2022 · Mark Gustafson · Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice the nails and rough asymmetry in Pinocchio's body. (staging)
Gris Grimly's design keeps Pinocchio raw and unfinished, closer to a branch than a polished marionette, and the puppet's imperfections stay visible on screen.
Payoff: Deleuze's expressionism names objects charged with a life not organic; the wood itself carries feeling. In the reading: expressionism. Pinocchio's gnarled, hand-carved surface is expressionism in Deleuze's sense: matter charged with a life that isn't organic.
Watch how the light shifts between candlelight and cold gray. (light)
Passingham lights Geppetto's home and church in warm candle tones, then shifts to hard, cold geometry wherever the Fascist state appears.
Payoff: The two temperatures separate love and coercion before a word of dialogue does it.
Listen for one actor's voice playing both Pinocchio and Carlo. (performance)
Gregory Mann voices Pinocchio and Geppetto's dead son Carlo, so every line the puppet speaks carries an echo of the boy who died.
Payoff: Deleuze's crystal-image is when a present thing and its double keep swapping places; here that happens through sound alone. In the reading: hyalosign. The shared voice makes Pinocchio and dead Carlo a crystal-image, present and virtual double swapping places in the same sound.
Listen for wood creaking against the machinery of the regime. (sound)
Desplat's sound design keeps the organic knock of the wooden boy distinct from the mechanized noise that surrounds Fascist and wartime scenes.
Payoff: The soundtrack keeps the boy's body and the state's machinery audibly at odds.
Track how each episode ends by revealing a bigger trap. (structure)
The carnival, the youth camp, and the war each start as an adventure and end by exposing a larger cage Pinocchio didn't see coming.
Payoff: Del Toro uses Collodi's chain of scrapes to keep uncovering how deep the coercion around Pinocchio actually runs.
Once you have seen it
Count how many times Geppetto ages while Pinocchio stays the same. (structure)
Across the film Geppetto grows more worn and weary while Pinocchio returns unchanged from every death, and the film holds that difference on screen.
Payoff: Deleuze's chronosign is time shown for itself rather than measured by action; here it is the gap between father and son. In the reading: chronosign. The mismatch between Geppetto's aging and Pinocchio's unchanging returns is a chronosign: time shown directly, not through suspense.
Watch the Fascist youth camp children move as a single body. (staging)
In the training scenes the boys drill and turn in unison, animated less as individuals than as one uniform mass.
Payoff: Deleuze calls a crowd animated as one affective unit a dividual; that is what fascism and stop-motion both do to a group.
Notice which death Pinocchio finally does not walk back from. (structure)
Every earlier death sends Pinocchio to the same underworld and back unchanged; watch for the moment that breaks the pattern.
Payoff: The film turns the puppet's old invulnerability, animation's oldest joke, into an ending built on loss instead of comedy.
Carry this in: Notice how often the film sets Pinocchio's wooden body beside the church's carved Christ.