No lie, Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Pinocchio’ could become 4th animated Best Picture nominee in Oscars history
Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” has entered the Best Picture conversation overnight following a successful premiere at the London Film Festival. But should we have counted it out in the first place? Del Toro’s recent track record—Best Picture winner “The Shape of Water” and nominee “Nightmare Alley”—makes him a hard filmmaker to ignore. He’s talked at length in promotional material about his personal relationship to the tale of the wooden boy and about the bond it fostered with his mother.
That’s the kind of narrative voters will be primed for in yet another year that sees an autobiographical drama as its Best Picture frontrunner. But there is a more compelling argument for the film’s pathway than that.
Netflix has several contenders on the fringe but no obvious play for the top prize. Their slate includes “Glass Onion,” “All Quiet On the Western Front,” “Bardo,” and “White Noise” (maybe even “The Wonder”). None of their Metacritic scores comes even close to “Pinocchio’s” glowing 93. Most people’s hesitation to predict it for Picture seems to stem from the infrequency with which animated films appear in the category. It’s only happened three times, after all. But consider that after a nearly two-decade gap between 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast” and 2009’s “Up,” “Toy Story 3” got a nomination the very next year. “Flee,” though falling short of Picture, broke all sorts of barriers just one awards cycle ago. If anyone can steepen that curve even further, it’s Guillermo del Toro.
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Reviews are calling the film thrilling, harrowing, challenging, and profound, so detractions reducing it to a “movie for kids” probably won’t stick. Wendy Ide of Screen Daily writes that “Pinocchio” is “a film which doesn’t sugar-coat the ache of bereavement, the futility of war or the manifold failures of mankind, but which manages to balance the darkness with sparks of hope, humour and humanity.” Hannah Shaw-Williams of Slash Film agrees that the movie presents viewers with “knotty, complex questions and real peril.”
Even before its unveiling, “Pinocchio” was at the top of most Animated Feature predictions. The film’s marketing (which emphasizes the painstaking stop-motion process) and Alexandre Desplat’s popularity with Academy voters also made Best Production Design and Best Score strong possibilities.
Best Visual Effects, Sound, and (though it would be unprecedented for an animated feature) Cinematography weren’t implausible, either. But effusive write-ups out of London suggest it could be formidable enough to compete in a relatively open Best Adapted Screenplay race. While Original is stacked, only “Women Talking” (Gold Derby’s current projected winner) and “The Whale” seem like Adapted locks. Del Toro’s dark, politically conscious reinterpretation of Carlo Collodi’s classic source material could impress voters in the same way Eric Roth’s updated take on “A Star is Born” did in 2018. However, one can also point to Tony Kushner’s failure a year ago to score a nomination for “West Side Story” as proof that, even in Adapted Screenplay, the Academy likes their stories original. Nevertheless, pickings are so slim that the umpteenth version of “Pinocchio” (and second this year) may just have a shot.
Netflix’s flexibility this season, dovetailed with the potential height of the movie’s nomination ceiling, makes del Toro’s “Pinocchio” one to keep an eye on.
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