Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is a somber meditation on fascism, fatherhood, and the corruption of innocence, which is to say it is a film of considerable moral weight but minimal engagement with contemporary progressive sensibilities. The filmmaker has taken the Italian puppet tale and relocated it to Mussolini's Italy, where the wooden boy becomes a pawn in a state apparatus designed to strip children of autonomy and remake them as obedient soldiers. The resulting film is darkly beautiful, genuinely unsettling, and absolutely devoid of the cultural markers that would register on a modern sociological scale.

What emerges from the narrative is a story about the dangers of authoritarianism, the seductive appeal of belonging to something larger than oneself, and the bonds between parent and child. These are serious, universal themes that transcend contemporary identity politics. The military academy sequence replaces the classic Pleasure Island corruption arc, and children are literally transformed into soldiers through indoctrination. It is bleak, it is intended to disturb, and it does neither of these things by leaning on the vocabulary of 2020s progressive discourse.

The film's sensibilities are fundamentally pre-postmodern. It believes in good and evil as distinct forces, in the corrupting nature of totalitarian power, in the redemptive potential of love and sacrifice. These are classical humanist positions, not progressive ones, and they predate the cultural frameworks we now associate with social consciousness by decades. Del Toro has made a film about resisting fascism, which is admirable, but resistance to fascism is not inherently woke, no matter how much contemporary critics might wish to claim it. The stop-motion animation is exquisite, the voice performances are committed, and the film won an Academy Award for animated feature, all of which matters not at all to the present assessment.