Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio
2022 · Mark Gustafson · Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio on Sightlines
A wooden boy walks into a church and the congregation turns on him. Above the altar hangs another wooden figure, carved by hand, nailed together, put on display in its suffering. Nobody in the scene says the obvious thing out loud. The staging says it. Same wood, same village hands. One of them is kissed; the other gets chased out the door. Del Toro plants that rhyme early and keeps circling back to it, and it tells you what kind of film you are in. Being made is not a defect here. The trouble is that people who kneel to a carved man cannot bear a carved boy who moves.
Moves is the whole problem. In Deleuze's account, the arts that wanted motion before cinema had to pick the peak instant: the discus at full coil, the pose that stands in for an entire action. He calls those privileged instants. Cinema broke with them by refusing to choose at all. It samples any instant whatever, equidistant and indifferent, and gets real movement out of that indifference. Stop-motion runs the engine backwards. Every one of those indifferent instants is posed by a person, lit, photographed, then taken apart and posed again. Mark Gustafson, who was animation director on Fantastic Mr. Fox, carried over that film's refusal to sand the surface down: the small ripple of hand-set cloth and hair stays in the picture instead of being smoothed out in post. You can see the touch. A film about a boy animated by hands is animated by hands and does not hide it.
Deleuze gave animation a paragraph or two, filed the cartoon under the movement-image as a drawing perpetually in the act of forming, and never returned to it in the volume on time. This film is the argument he did not get to hear.
Del Toro's real departure from every other Pinocchio is not Mussolini. It is that this one cannot die. He is killed and he comes back, over and over, passing through a liminal underworld and returning. Think about what that does to the machinery he inherited. Collodi's novel is a chain of scrapes, and a chain of scrapes is the most dependable engine cinema owns: a character acts, and the act uncovers a little more of a situation he could not see from where he was standing. Volpe's carnival turns out to be a cage. The youth camp turns out to be a rehearsal for the war. Deleuze called this the small form of the action-image, where the deed discloses the situation, and it runs entirely on jeopardy. Take death off the table and the chain keeps turning without resolving anything. That is the crisis of the action-image, engineered on purpose, inside a children's story. The question stops being whether he survives. It becomes who he will outlive. No action answers that. It is a question about time, and the film hands it over directly instead of through suspense — a chronosign, in Deleuze's term: time shown for itself rather than used as the measure of somebody's movement. Pinocchio's clock does not run. Geppetto's does. The gap between them is the film.
The grief is built into the casting. Gregory Mann voices Pinocchio, and also voices Carlo, the son Geppetto lost in the First World War, whose death put the chisel in his hand. Two boys, one voice. A crystal-image, for Deleuze, is an image in which a present thing and its virtual double keep swapping places until you cannot say which one you are looking at; the standard case is a mirror. Here it is a sound. Geppetto looks at a puppet and sees a dead child. We hear the puppet and hear the dead child. Substitution is not a theme laid over this film, it is a fact of the soundtrack. A crystal has no outside, which makes it a trap, everything inside it referring back to itself. What rescues the film from mourning-as-decor is the fissure: the father comes to love the thing standing in front of him rather than the thing behind it, and the boy, holding endlessness, trades it for a mortal life. Every earlier version had the puppet begging to be real. This one has him choosing to be finite, which is a completely different wish.
The politics come in through the same door. At the Podestà's youth camp, children in uniform move as one body: what Deleuze calls the dividual, a crowd animated as a single affective unit instead of a set of people. That is a fair description of what fascism wants from a population, and also of what an animator does to a crowd of puppets. Mussolini shows up at the carnival as a small, ridiculous caricature, the leader given his feeble inversion, deflated by being handed a puppet's body. Then the sharp part. What the state wants from Pinocchio is what Geppetto wants at first: obedience, living up to expectations. Del Toro rhymes the father with the regime and breaks both, which is the moral architecture of Pan's Labyrinth carried across intact, a child's dark fable braided into fascist violence with disobedience treated as a virtue rather than a phase.
The surfaces keep that argument audible. Gris Grimly's design leaves the boy gnarled and asymmetrical, nails showing, closer to a branch than to a marionette: expressionism in Deleuze's sense, where things are charged with a life that is not organic, and the sound design holds it in the creak and knock of wood against the machine noise of the state. Frank Passingham lights two temperatures and lets them do the thematic work, candle warmth in the workshop and cold geometry wherever the regime is standing. That palette and the Christ rhyme both come out of The Shape of Water. The acting is posture. Weight shifting, a glance landing a beat late. Deleuze's cinema of the body, duration carried by attitude instead of plot, performed here by a body that is literally made of wood.
The debts are specific. The Nightmare Before Christmas proved a feature-length gothic stop-motion musical on ball-and-socket armatures could aim past the nursery. Coraline built the 3D-printed replacement-face library these expressions depend on; without that pipeline a puppet cannot grieve legibly for two hours. Fantastic Mr. Fox supplied the visible-touch performance style, through Gustafson personally. The Devil's Backbone supplied the benevolent monsters and the Catholic imagery bent toward heterodox ends. Looking forward is harder to claim honestly, since the film is recent and the record is thin. What it demonstrably did: it won the Academy Award with streaming money behind a form theatrical studios had repeatedly declined to fund, and it pushed real stop-motion capacity toward Guadalajara alongside Portland. Influence as infrastructure, patronage and a trained workforce, which is usually how a slow art survives at all.
The oldest convention in animation is the body that cannot be hurt. Flatten it and it inflates. Drop it off the cliff and it walks back into the shot. Del Toro takes that birthright of every drawn and jointed body and refuses to play it for a laugh. He plays it as bereavement. That is the contribution: the animated body's invulnerability, which had always been the license for comedy, turned into the ground of an elegy.
Watch it again for the waiting, and for the seams, the hair that ripples when nothing has touched it. And carry the question the film is actually built on, which is not whether a puppet can become a real boy. It is whether a father can survive being outlived by what his own hands made.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — The film is physical stop-motion, hand-armatured puppets photographed one frame at a time, with the un-smoothed, visible-touch performance style Gustafson brought from Fantastic Mr. Fox: cinema's indifferent sampling of motion reversed, every instant posed by a hand.
- symbol — The recurring staging pairing the wooden boy with the carved Christ above the church altar, which provokes the townspeople's suspicion — one object condensing the film's organizing relation between being made, being worshipped, and being feared.
- action-image-small-form — The retained Collodi picaresque episode-chain in which the boy is repeatedly led astray, exploited by Count Volpe's travelling carnival, and endangered — each deed disclosing more of a situation he could not see.
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Del Toro makes Pinocchio effectively unable to die; he passes through a liminal underworld and returns, so the inherited chain of scrapes keeps turning without jeopardy and the stakes shift from whether he survives to whom he outlives.
- chronosign — The dossier's own formulation of the film's converted stakes — what it means to love mortal things and to be the immortal one who outlives them — presents time itself as the subject rather than as the measure of an action.
- hyalosign — Gregory Mann voices both Pinocchio and Carlo, Geppetto's son lost in the First World War, and Geppetto carves the puppet in the throes of that grief: the living boy and the dead one become indiscernible in the ear.
- crystal-cracked — The boy must contend with being loved for the wrong reasons before he can be loved for himself, and the arc resolves in an embrace of finitude rather than the usual wish to become a real boy — the fissure out of the grief-mirror.
- dividual — The Podestà's Fascist youth camp, where uniformed children are moved and drilled as a single body, staged against a regime the film treats as the ultimate expression of coerced conformity.
- inversion-image — Mussolini appears as a small, ridiculous caricature during the carnival sequence, a deliberate deflation of tyranny that gives the sublime leader his feeble inversion in puppet form.
- expressionism — The Gris Grimly design key renders Pinocchio raw and unfinished — nails protruding, limbs asymmetrical, nearer a branch than Disney's rounded marionette — while the sound design sets the organic creak and knock of wood against the mechanized noise of the Fascist world.
- affective colour — Frank Passingham's two-temperature palette, warm candlelit intimacy in Geppetto's home and church against the cold hard geometry of the state and the war, imported from The Shape of Water and doing much of the thematic work visually.
- attitudes and postures — The animators' craft described as translating vocal performance into physical acting — the weight of a puppet's shifting posture, the timing of a glance — frame by frame.