A Christ-like Pinocchio?

‘What does it mean to be human?’ and ‘What makes a good life?’ are two key questions which all cultures, whether religious or secular, must ask.

The answers are rarely expressed as a clearly articulated philosophy, but rather embedded in what philosopher Charles Taylor terms a ‘social imaginary’, which he describes as the way ordinary people ‘imagine’ the world to be, and ‘imagine’ life to work. This imaginary seeps into our unconscious through the myriad of ‘images, stories and legends’ which make up a culture and shape our daily lives.

This is surely one of the reasons why Pinocchio, the story of a wooden puppet brought to life, whose father wants him to be a ‘good boy’ and who in turn desires to become a ‘real [human] boy’, has fascinated audiences since Carlo Collodi penned the story in 1883. And also why Guillermo del Toro’s animated version, released last month on Netflix, is well worth watching.

Mexican director Del Toro’s Pinocchio, set against the backdrop of WWII in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, is a visually beautiful and painstakingly made work of art. Best known for his fantastical reality tales Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), Del Toro’s team took over two and a half years to make the movie using stop-motion animation. Some of the individual puppets took a year to make, and the results are enchanting, giving both a fairy-tale beauty and a gritty reality to the storytelling that is unlike anything you will see in Disney or Pixar. But it is also worth engaging with del Toro’s version of the story to explore what he is communicating about these two fundamental cultural questions of humanness and the good life.

Carl Truman, in his excellent The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020), details how Western culture has undergone a ‘revolution’ in the past few centuries.

Where previously it was assumed there is a given shape to human nature, now we believe that each of us must be free to become our inner, authentically chosen selves. Whereas previously the most important thing was to live a virtuous life, now the end point of our existence is personal happiness.

This modern idea of the self is what we absorb every day through the social imaginary of films and TV series and it is echoed in many recent children’s animations in which fathers must learn to let go of their expectations and accept their children for who they authentically are. In some regards this latest cinematic version of Pinocchio conforms to this type. In del Toro’s story, when the Tree Sprite (looking like one of the cherubim from the book of Revelation) brings Pinocchio to life, he is not the good and obedient child that Geppetto’s deceased son Carlo was. It is only when Geppetto loses Pinocchio to Count Volpe’s travelling circus, that he begins to let go of his parental expectations and appreciate Pinocchio for who he really is.

In a similar vein, through Pinocchio’s encouragement, his school friend Candlewick learns to assert his authentic inner self and reject the macho expectations of his bullying fascist father. But if you look more carefully, there is far more going on in del Toro’s movie. Pinocchio is not merely the story of how each of us must become our authentic selves, but rather a journey in which Pinocchio and Geppetto discover that it is sacrificial love that makes us truly human.

This theme comes through most powerfully in the three ‘deaths’ that Pinocchio suffers during his escapades. Each time he is run over, shot, or blown-up, Pinocchio enters a shadowy underworld where he encounters Death. The first time, Death tells him that he ‘cannot truly die, because he is not a real boy’, and that when the last grain of sand falls in an hourglass, he will return to life. At first Pinocchio is overjoyed with this gift of immortality, imagining all the boyishly dangerous things he can do without dying (and Candlewick’s fascist father is excited at exploiting Pinocchio’s indestructability for the greater good of Italy). But on his second visit, when Pinocchio’s adventures have begun to open his eyes to the brokenness of the world, Death explains a shadow-side to this gift: ‘Life can bring great suffering, and eternal life eternal suffering.’ It is on his third and final visit, when Pinocchio wants to return immediately to the land of the living to save his father from drowning, that he is told he can only do so if he is willing to sacrifice his immortality and become a mortal human boy.

Del Toro even gives a visual Christian overlay to this theme of the indestructible son who must sacrifice his immortality to save the one he loves. The bomb that kills Carlo, Geppetto’s much-loved son, lands just as he is painting red daubs of blood on a wooden crucifix he has made for the church. The explosion rips the left arm off the Christ figure. In the final scene, Pinocchio is killed when he detonates a sea-mine to save Geppetto from being swallowed by a monstrous whale. When Pinocchio returns to life for the final time, having chosen to become a mortal boy, his left arm is also missing. What we see in this film is counter to our current social imaginary of self-actualisation: to be truly human we must be prepared to bear the burdens and sacrifices that come with moving beyond ourselves and loving another person.

PINOCCHIO
Director Guillermo del Toro Netflix Original. Rated PG)