The trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio has come for your tears

Batting clean-up in 2022’s trilogy of major stop-motion animation achievements, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio seems destined to destroy. From Gepetto’s craggily carved face to his wooden son’s sweet voice, the trailer for del Toro’s Netflix wonder promises a more sincere version of the class fairy story than, say, the cynical advertisement for Disney+ released earlier this year.

Released earlier today, the new spot dives into the whole plot. Mourning the loss of his young son, Gepetto (Harry Potter’s David Bradley) does the next saddest thing: Builds a new son out of wood. That son is Pinocchio (voiced by Greggory Mann, whose Groot-like demeanor acts like a magnet for grifters, cheats, and exploitative showbusiness types. We assume most know where this is heading: Nose grows, whale eats, Gepetto cries. But under del Toro’s direction, Pinocchio promises something far more unique.

Everything about del Toro’s production looks outside the norm, particularly after Robert Zemickis’ Disney remake earlier this year. His decision to stage the action against the backdrop of fascist Italy circa World War II lends a lot of power to its characters. The mundane violence of a fascist takeover creates a sinister aura for a children’s story—just the type of thing to make the real sense of danger, drama, and subtext that allowed stories like Pinocchio to survive decades of reworkings.

The magic of stop-motion is on full display here, with plenty of moments to wonder how the heck they made this thing. Some shots, like one of Cate Blanchett’s Spazzatura, the monkey, took months to set up and shoot. Speaking to Collider, del Toro and co-director Mark Gustafson explain it all:

Mark Gustafson: There was one shot, when Spazzatura the monkey comes, he leads us to meet one of our villains. And he comes through this whole carnival that’s been created. And it was a oner, and it was a long shot and there were lots of puppets involved, lots of choreography, lots of action.

Guillermo Del Toro: Single shot.

MG: One single shot. Yeah. It took us about two and a half months to set it up. And it took about a month to shoot.

GTD: And we went through about three puppets. We destroyed three puppets of Spazzatura doing that shot. And from the beginning, when we were talking about staging with the camera in a more naturalistic way, where the camera moved and the actors moved and more like you would stage in live action, that was one of the shots that was singled out from pre-production. We are going to do this one this way.

And it was searching naturalism, not only on the way we shot with the camera, but the actors. The acting in this movie does not recur to pantomime and key posing and all these languages that has been codified almost to the emoji point of being a repetition of hip poses. We wanted to have actors that acted and that were internal […] This all came out of a phrase that I’ll never forget, that Miyazaki said, “If you shoot the ordinary, it will be extraordinary.” And I think that was one of the great North Stars of this movie.

Pinocchio is in select theaters this month and streams on Netflix on December 9.