Guillermo Del Toro brought Pinocchio to his big movie premiere, and it was really very cute

It’s a grim old world out there lately: Disappearing crabs, nuclear armageddon trending on Twitter, spellcheck getting lippy with us about whether we capitalize armageddon…It’s rough times all around.

So please take, as a minor antidote to the “Ugh…” of it all, these red carpet photos from the big BFI London Film Festival premiere of Netflix’s Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio today, in which Del Toro and several of his cast members—including veteran actor David Bradley, and Pinocchio himself, Gregory Mann—posed for shots with a tiny Pinocchio, and also they took at least one shot where Pinocchio himself was alone on the red carpet, and oooh, just look at him standing there. Maybe we’re just a soft touch on Saturday mornings, but it looked pretty dang cute to us. (Also, it’s very funny to imagine all these Very Serious festival photographers crouching down to snap pictures of a puppet.)

The irony here is that, per the advance reviews from the premiere, Del Toro’s take on Carlo Collodi’s classic novel (due to arrive on Netflix in December) is unsurprisingly dark as hell: We’re reasonably sure this is the first Pinocchio adaptation in which Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini makes a major appearance. On the other hand, the lead-up to the film has also displayed the absolute artistry—enhanced by work from The Jim Henson Company—that’s been applied to Del Toro and his team’s stop-motion recreation of the classic fable. Even just looking at the doll on the red carpet, it’s easy to see how much liveliness has been imbued into the character—especially when you see a few of the shots of a wax mannequin someone seems to have pulled out of a back room somewhere and posed with Pinocchio, apparently just for contrast:

It’s amazing, how lifelike some of these things can get!