Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio (movie 2022) wooden, so wooden

Guillermo Del Toro seems to have arrived at a self-indulgent phase of his career. One where he believes he can do no wrong. Like he’s too huge to go wrong now. And no, that isn’t a pun on his gargantuan size, although…seriously…the man looks dangerously overweight.
But anyway, I’m actually a major fan of Del Toro. Love most of his work. His latest output, though…there was a disappointing noir adventure Nightmare Alley. Then, a welcome return to horror with Cabinet of Curiosities anthology but his involvement there was fairly limited, mostly as a sometimes author and creature co-creator. And now this…Del Toro for children. Or is it?
Granted Del Toro’s Pinocchio is much closer to the original source than Disney and therefore is considerably darker. Granted the stop-motion animation is rather striking. But beyond that, you have a beloved tale turned into something like a lesson on mortality for children. Because you know how much kids love lessons and how much they contemplate mortality…
Mind you, I’m all for darkness in stories, but there’s a way to handle it, to balance it, and this movie doesn’t quite do that right.
There are songs here, too. And I was thinking what garbage lyrics set to pretty melody. Only the final song was any good. And sure enough, in credits Del Toro wrote the lyrics for the majority of the songs but not the final one. The music is done by Del Toro’s frequent collaborator, Desplat and is faultless. So there’s one thing Del Toro can’t or maybe just shouldn’t do…produce ingenious rhymes like “My son, my son, you are my shining sun” for instance.
Then there’s the peculiar casting. The sidelines are all Del Toro’s regulars, the man loves to recycle, but the main cast has one huge talent and a David Bradley (randomly) and some unknown kid with a piecing voice.. Why? No idea.
And this major talent, mind you, isn’t even given a chance to shine until the credits song. The rest are singing freely. And speaking. In weird mismatched voices.
Which is to say there is no explanation whatsoever as to why Geppetto’s son Carlo (named after Carlo Collodi the author of the book) and Pinocchio himself are speaking with a shrill British accent. They are in Italy. The background characters are speaking with Italian accents. It sounds flat-out weird, distractingly so. The rest of the cast is all over the place but fairly uniform, and nowhere near as British as the wooden boy.
And also, whose bright idea was it to cast the great Cate Blanchett as a demented looking monkey with virtually no lines but grunts? Seriously?
But anyway...even if you put all of this aside, even if you ignore the weird tone of the movie which meditates on war and death and all those cheerful kid-friendly themes, the fact remains is that it just doesn’t charm you. It must. It has to. The original story does.
But Del Toro (and okay, yes, he does share a directing chair on this one and no, I’m not going to make a joke of someone having to share a chair with a man Del Toro’s size) has made one huge unforgivable mistake with this adaptation–he made Pinocchio unlikable. Somehow he managed to do that. Pinocchio is meant to be charming, wily, misbehaved but adorable, and Del Toro’s (and that other guy’s) version is annoying, shrill, and irritating. Bewildering but true. And sad, so sad.
The movie managed to score critical acclaim and even award nominations, but this viewer/reviewer was profoundly disappointed. You can always drop 117 minutes and decide for yourself.