9 / 10
Official trailer
Matteo Garrone’s Pinocchio is the most faithful screen adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 source novel ever produced.
The Italian film was released in December 2019. It grossed approximately twenty-three million dollars worldwide on a production budget of approximately fifteen million dollars. It did modest business. The critical reception was considerably stronger. The film delivered the dark moral fable that the Collodi source had written and that previous adaptations had systematically softened. The 9/10 is honest.
If all you know is the Disney version, this one will knock you sideways, and it should.
I adore this film, and part of the pleasure is how little it cares about keeping me comfortable. Garrone trusts Collodi’s cruelty, trusts his Tuscan hills, and trusts a nine-year-old buried in wooden prosthetics to carry the whole picture. After so many cute puppets and cheerful crickets, watching an Italian director hand this story back to Italy feels like a correction I didn’t know I’d been waiting for.
The production is the work of Italian filmmakers reclaiming their own cultural property from international adaptations.
Carlo Collodi’s novel is one of the most translated Italian literary works in history. The Disney 1940 adaptation and later international productions have shaped global perception of the property. Garrone’s version returns the material to its original Tuscan setting, Italian language, and dark moral structure. The film is the canonical Italian adaptation that the Collodi source has been waiting for since the novel’s serialization in 1881.
The Production
Matteo Garrone directed. He’d previously directed Gomorrah, Tale of Tales, and Dogman. His earlier work showed his capacity for handling dark fairy-tale material with adult sensibility. Tale of Tales in particular had established his approach to adapting Italian folkloric source material at the level the source requires. Pinocchio extended the approach to one of Italy’s most famous literary properties.
Production took place in Tuscany, primarily in the actual rural Italian regions where Collodi had set the source novel. The real locations are one of the film’s distinctive achievements. The film doesn’t present a generic European fairy-tale setting. Garrone presents Tuscan rural geography, Italian village architecture, and Italian agricultural and craft culture as the actual world the story inhabits. Audiences who have spent time in rural Tuscany recognize the places. Audiences who haven’t get an accurate introduction to the region.
The production design draws on nineteenth-century Italian rural reality instead of on fairy-tale stylization. The buildings, the clothing, the tools, the food, and the social organization all reflect actual 1880s Italian peasant life. The Collodi novel was written about a specific historical moment in Italian rural development. The film returns the material to that historical specificity instead of translating it into the timeless fairy-tale aesthetic that international adaptations have generally preferred.
The practical effects work was real. The Pinocchio character was rendered through extensive prosthetic makeup applied to child actor Federico Ielapi across daily sessions that ran several hours each, with physical materials doing the job CGI would’ve done anywhere else. I think that’s the best decision in the whole production. This Pinocchio occupies physical space, the other actors can touch him and play off him, and he never slides into the uncanny valley that swallows every digital Pinocchio I can think of.
The integration is one of the film’s significant technical achievements.
The Source
Carlo Collodi serialized The Adventures of Pinocchio in the Italian children’s magazine Giornale per i bambini between 1881 and 1883.
The novel was assembled from the serialized installments after the run completed. The original serialization had ended with Pinocchio’s death by hanging in chapter fifteen. Collodi continued the story under reader pressure. The continued chapters produced the eventual transformation into a real boy and the romantic ending that the modern novel preserves.
The novel is considerably darker than international adaptations suggest.
Pinocchio kills the Talking Cricket in the first encounter instead of receiving moral guidance. Pinocchio burns off his own feet by accident and Geppetto must carve replacements. The Fox and the Cat hang Pinocchio from the Great Oak. Pinocchio is briefly imprisoned. The donkey transformation on Playland is graphic and includes Pinocchio being beaten as a beast of burden, sold to a circus, and eventually drowned to be sold for his hide. The dark content was deliberate.
Collodi was writing moral fable that warned children about the consequences of misbehavior. The warnings required actual consequences.
The Garrone adaptation preserves considerably more of this dark content than the Disney version did. The Talking Cricket dies in the early sequence.
Garrone depicts the foot-burning incident. He shows the Great Oak hanging. He renders the donkey transformation with the kind of graphic specificity that the source required. The film also preserves the original ending where Pinocchio becomes a real boy through showed moral growth instead of through arbitrary magical intervention. Pinocchio earns the transformation. The earning is the source’s central moral argument.
The Cast
Roberto Benigni played Geppetto. The casting is one of the film’s interesting choices. Benigni had previously directed and starred in his own 2002 Pinocchio adaptation where he played the title character. The 2002 film was widely considered one of the worst adaptations of the source. The 2019 casting placed Benigni in the supporting role of Geppetto in a production that delivered the kind of faithful adaptation his own earlier production had failed to provide. I think it’s a lovely piece of casting: the man who botched the puppet gets a second shot as the father, and he makes the most of it.
Benigni delivers the Geppetto role with restrained dignity that his own earlier production hadn’t allowed him to access.
Federico Ielapi played Pinocchio. He was about nine during production and sat through hours of prosthetic makeup before each shooting day. The character has to read as a wooden puppet through movement and expression while still carrying the big emotional moments, and Ielapi manages both. I’m amazed a kid that young could act through all that and still make me care about a puppet who misbehaves for most of the film. The whole picture leans on him, and it holds.
Marine Vacth played the Blue Fairy. The performance brings the kind of theatrical elegance that the role requires. The Blue Fairy in the Garrone version isn’t the warm grandmotherly figure Disney established.
The Blue Fairy is the magical authority who provides the conditions under which Pinocchio can become a real boy. The conditions are strict. The authority is impersonal. Vacth plays the character with the kind of cool theatrical distance that the source requires.
Rocco Papaleo played the Fox. Massimo Ceccherini played the Cat. The two supporting villain performances bring real Italian theatrical comedy tradition to the roles. The Fox and the Cat in the Collodi source are con men who repeatedly deceive Pinocchio. The Garrone adaptation maintains the con-man theatrical tone. The performances don’t soften the threat the characters represent. The characters are dangerous because the characters are charming. Pinocchio falls for the manipulation because the manipulation is well-executed. The audience can see what Pinocchio can’t.
Gigi Proietti played Mangiafuoco, the giant puppet master who imprisons Pinocchio.
The performance is one of the late achievements of Proietti’s career before his death in 2020. The character is the Italian equivalent of Disney’s Stromboli, though considerably less softened in the Garrone version. Mangiafuoco is a threatening figure whose theatrical sentiment about his fellow puppets doesn’t prevent him from being a dangerous business operator. Proietti plays the contradictions with real commitment.
For Writers
Garrone’s Pinocchio shows the value of returning adapted material to its original cultural context instead of translating it into the international generic aesthetic that previous adaptations have preferred. The Collodi novel was written about specific 1880s Italian rural reality. The Garrone film returns the material to that reality. The real locations, the real language, the faithful production design, and the cultural detail combine to produce an adaptation that works inside the world the source created.
The lesson for writers adapting other cultures’ material is that cultural specificity often produces stronger work than cultural generalization.
Translation into international generic aesthetic typically strips out the details that gave the source its particular power. Returning to the source’s cultural specificity restores what the translation removed. The Garrone film is the example. The Disney adaptation generalized the material into international fairy tale. The Garrone adaptation returns it to its Italian context. The two approaches produce different work. The Garrone version preserves what the source was.
The general version preserves only what the source could be translated into.
The Practical Effects
The practical effects approach is one of the film’s central craft achievements.
Garrone rendered the Pinocchio character through extensive prosthetic makeup instead of through CGI. He rendered the supporting animal characters similarly through prosthetic makeup applied to human actors. The Talking Cricket. The Fox. The Cat. The Snail. The Pigeon. Each character occupies physical space in scenes with other actors instead of being added in post-production through digital techniques.
The choice has multiple craft justifications. The prosthetic approach allows the actors to deliver actual performances that the other actors can respond to during shooting instead of approximating reactions to absent characters. The physical presence produces integration with the scene that CGI compositing rarely matches. The aesthetic tone also matches the Tuscan rural setting more effectively than digital effects would have. The visual integration of human actors in prosthetic makeup with the actual physical environments produces a fairy-tale world that feels like the actual world instead of like digital fabrication.
The makeup work was extensive. Federico Ielapi as Pinocchio required several hours of daily prosthetic application. The supporting actors required varying degrees of similar work. The time the makeup work required constrained the production. The constraint produced focused shooting that maintained quality across the runtime. The aesthetic results were the kind that practical effects consistently produce when the production commits to them instead of treating them as fallback when digital effects fail.
The Pleasure Island Sequence
In the Pleasure Island sequence, the Garrone film delivers considerably more of the source’s content than Disney preserved.
Lampwick and Pinocchio travel to the Land of Toys where children are promised unlimited play. The boys transform into donkeys. The film shows the transformation graphically. Pinocchio is sold as a beast of burden. His owner beats him. He’s forced to perform in a circus. The Coachman eventually decides to drown him to recover the hide for sale.
The drowning sequence is one of the more harrowing moments in any recent Italian film aimed at family audiences. Pinocchio is weighted with stones and thrown into the ocean. He sinks. The water fills his body.
He’s rescued only because the fish underwater eat his wooden donkey body and free the wooden boy underneath. The sequence preserves the source’s moral argument with rare fidelity. The Collodi novel was arguing that misbehavior produces severe consequences. The Garrone film delivers the severe consequences without softening them.
The sequence is difficult viewing for younger children, and the film is right for older children who can handle it. I think the drowning is the bravest thing Garrone does, and it’s why I gave the film a 9. Most filmmakers would’ve cut away or softened it to protect the family audience. Garrone lets it be as frightening as Collodi wrote it, and it’ll rattle anyone expecting the Disney version. That’s the right call, because Collodi wrote the book to scare children into behaving.
The Score
Dario Marianelli composed the score. Marianelli had previously composed for Pride and Prejudice, Atonement, and other prestige international productions. His Pinocchio score uses Italian folk music tradition combined with orchestral material. The recurring themes deploy mandolin, accordion, and chamber strings in proportions that match the rural Tuscan setting. The musical material grounds the film in Italian cultural specificity instead of in international orchestral generality.
The score work doesn’t deploy hit songs in the Disney tradition. The film isn’t a musical. The score is dramatic reinforcement instead of a vehicle for individual song sequences. The choice matches the source material. The Collodi novel doesn’t contain songs. The Disney adaptation invented the musical structure. The Garrone film returns to the non-musical source. I didn’t miss the songs for a second. A singing cricket would have wrecked this film.
The Adult Tone
Tonally, the film is more adult than international audiences expect from Pinocchio adaptations.
The dramatic content is considerably darker than Disney audiences are conditioned to expect. The violence is more direct. The moral consequences are more severe. The pacing is slower. The dialogue is more theatrical. The result is a film that works inside Italian art-cinema conventions instead of within international family-film conventions.
The tonal choice is right for the source.
The Collodi novel was written for Italian children in the 1880s. Italian children of the 1880s had different cultural expectations than contemporary international family-film audiences. The novel addressed dark content directly because nineteenth-century Italian children’s literature addressed dark content directly. The Garrone film preserves the original tonal tone instead of translating into contemporary international family-film tone. The choice produces a film that reads as period-suitable adaptation instead of as contemporary children’s entertainment.
Audiences who approach the film expecting Disney-style family entertainment will likely find the experience disorienting.
The film is dark, and it’s also faithful to its source. The choice between Disney-style adaptation and source-faithful adaptation is a real choice. The Disney version is more accessible. The Garrone version is more honest about what the source was. Both versions have their place, but only Garrone had the nerve to film the book Collodi wrote.
For Writers
What Garrone’s Pinocchio shows is the cost of treating source material as raw material for translation instead of as work with its own internal integrity. Disney treated the Collodi novel as material that could be adapted for any audience the studio chose to target. The 1940 adaptation modified the source for American family audiences. The 2022 Zemeckis remake modified the Disney version further for contemporary children. Each later translation removed more of what the source had been doing.
Garrone’s version returns to the source and treats the source as the work to be respected instead of as the raw material to be modified.
The result is an adaptation that preserves what the source had been arguing instead of what later adaptations had decided the source should argue. The lesson for writers is that adaptation requires respect for source material when the source is serious. Inferior adaptation strips out what makes the source valuable.
Superior adaptation preserves the source’s particular contributions while finding the right medium for those contributions in the new form. Garrone found the right medium. The medium was faithful Italian art-cinema rendering. The result is the canonical adaptation that the Collodi source had been waiting for since the 1880s.
Comparison To The Other Pinocchios
The major Pinocchio adaptations are now sufficient in number that they can be compared as distinct interpretations of the source. The 1940 Disney animated version remains the most influential and most commercially successful. The Garrone version is the most faithful to the source. The 2022 Zemeckis live-action remake is the worst. The 2002 Benigni version is also widely considered weak. The 2022 Guillermo del Toro stop-motion version sits between the Garrone faithfulness and the Disney accessibility, with del Toro’s particular dark fairy-tale aesthetic providing yet another distinct interpretation.
If you care about Pinocchio at all, the Garrone and del Toro versions are the two serious modern takes, and the 1940 Disney still matters for what it did to the story’s place in the culture. I’d skip the Zemeckis remake without a second thought, and the Benigni version with it. The property has been lucky to have serious filmmakers willing to deal with Collodi on his own terms, after so many years of being ground into formula family entertainment.
Craft Note
Craft Note
For what national cinema can accomplish when local filmmakers reclaim their cultural properties from international adaptation, Garrone’s Pinocchio is the example case. The Pinocchio property has been internationalized for over a century. Disney’s 1940 adaptation shaped global perception. Various later international productions extended the internationalization. The Italian source was systematically translated into versions that other cultures found accessible. Garrone returned the material to its original cultural context. The Italian language. The Italian setting. The Italian cultural conventions. The Italian theatrical traditions.
The result is an adaptation that works inside the world the source created. The lesson for writers is that cultural specificity is often the strength of source material that translation strips away. International adaptations of national literary properties typically remove the specific cultural details that gave the source its particular character. Returning to the source’s cultural specificity restores what translation removed. National cinemas serving their own cultural properties produce work that international adaptations can’t match. The work is more specific and more honest.
The work preserves what the source was instead of what other cultures preferred the source to be.
Is Pinocchio (Garrone, 2019) as good as people say?
A 9/10. Garrone’s Pinocchio is the most faithful screen adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s source novel ever produced. The Tuscan locations ground the film in the actual world the source created. The practical effects approach produces a Pinocchio character that occupies physical space instead of suffering uncanny valley CGI issues. The performances combine Italian theatrical tradition with the dramatic tone the source requires. The dark content is preserved with the kind of fidelity that previous international adaptations have systematically avoided.
The film is essential viewing for audiences interested in what the Pinocchio story is.
It isn’t a film for very young children, and I wouldn’t show it to one. Anyone who wants the cheerful version should stick with the 1940 Disney. For me, Garrone made the Pinocchio I’d been wanting, cruel where Collodi is cruel and tender where he’s tender, with a real boy at the center who earns his transformation.
I only knock a point off because the slow pacing tests my patience in places. That’s the one thing keeping it from a 10.
