The Wood Sprite’s Introduction & The 9 Other Most Disturbing Moments In Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

The Wood Sprite’s introduction in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is just one of the disturbing moments in the stop-motion adaptation film, showing that his children’s story will be much darker than the usual genre fare. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is not only one of many movie adaptations of the Italian children’s fantasy novel but one of three Pinocchio film adaptations that arrived in 2022. This Pinocchio is darker than earlier versions of the film and seeks to display the grimmer aspects of fairytales that can get lost in contemporary children’s movies.

Guillermo del Toro’s filmography is filled with movies that examine the arcane, the mystical, the deranged, and many other creepy, though often mesmerizingly beautiful, aspects of folklore and religion. His version of Pinocchio is characteristically disturbing and unsettling. Where some other filmmakers may find something cute and relatable in a story about a puppet that wants to be a real boy, del Toro finds something existential in uncovering what humanity actually means. Throw in fascist Italy as a backdrop that ties themes of sacrifice and the treatment of others together and this is one unnerving Pinocchio adaptation.

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The Wood Sprite’s Introduction

Guillermo Del Toro Creates Another Haunting Creature

Of the many differences between Disney’s Pinocchio and Guillermo del Toro’s, the appearance of the Wood Sprite, or the Blue Fairy in the 1940 film, is one of the best. Like the Blue Fairy from Disney’s film, the Wood Sprite gives life to the puppet Geppetto creates and assigns Sebastian J. Cricket to be Pinocchio’s moral guide through life. The sprite is not cute and impish like in many classic fairytales, but a large, many-winged creature who wears an unmoving mask that hides her true face, if she even has one.

On her many wings are dozens of eyes staring out, and the effect makes the creature look more like a demon than anything else. Voiced by Tilda Swinton in an ethereal and unsettling performance, it’s unclear even to Sebastian whether the Wood Sprite is a friend or something to be feared. Even when she appears at the end of the film to help Pinocchio, she never stops being a disturbing sight.

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Geppetto Makes Pinocchio

Pinocchio Is Created Out Of Grief

If Geppetto losing his human son at the start of Pinocchio is not frightening enough, his grief-stricken and drunken efforts to create a new child out of wood are even more disturbing. The sequence of the heartbroken elderly man sobbing over his son’s grave followed by him grimly deciding to cut down a tree for a new one has more similarities with Frankenstein than it does with any of the previous adaptions. The carpenter is often only shown in silhouette, like a slasher villain or the murderer in Psycho.

The end result of his work, which he’s barely sober enough to comprehend, is a wooden approximation of a boy. Far from the yellow cap-wearing, whistling wooden puppet of Disney’s Pinocchio, this Pinocchio is a cobbled-together thing born from anger, and it has the chipped body and crackly limbs to prove it.

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Pinocchio Is Hit By A Truck

Geppetto Loses His Son For The Second Time In His Life

Del Toro’s Pinocchio does not slow down with the sudden deaths and soon after Pinocchio is given life, he is summarily killed after a tuck runs him over. What’s most disturbing about the scene is that it comes after Geppetto and the boy get into an argument, which spills out onto the street where the old man and the villainous Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) play tug-of-war over the puppet. Pinocchio is thrown into the path of an oncoming vehicle and, once again, Geppetto has to cradle the lifeless body of a child he made.

Despite making the creature, Gepetto has not fully grown to appreciate him yet. He only realizes his love for the puppet when it’s taken from him and, while the audience may understand Pinocchio is not gone for good (it’s still the beginning of the movie), Geppetto is at a loss. Seeing the tragedy etched on his face is disturbing and heartbreaking simultaneously.

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Pinocchio Is Introduced To The Wood Sprite’s Sister, Death

The Creature Who Rules The Realm Of The Dead Is Unnerving

After Pinocchio is killed by the truck, his spirit is taken to the land of the dead. He’s carried in a coffin by black, skeletal rabbits, who, before they are revealed to be comic relief, are quite unnerving in their silent, blank-eyed procession. They then carry Pinocchio to meet the Wood Sprite’s sister: Death. This is another monster up there with Guillermo del Toro’s scariest movie creatures​​​​. Death also has an unmoving, masked face, and is also voiced by Tilda Swinton.

She has the body of a lion, a serpentine tail like a Chimera, goat horns, and large buffalo horns with the requisite eyes implanted along their length. Death, as it turns out, is a friendly and kind figure, but her reminder to Pinocchio that each death will require a longer stay in eternity, combined with her otherworldly depiction makes for a disturbing scene.

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Mussolini Meets Pinocchio

Guillermo Del Toro Makes A Statement About Fascism

When Pinocchio discovers that Volpe is keeping his earnings and not passing them along to Geppetto, the puppet decides to get back at his paymaster for what he assumes is nothing more than a minor prank, that is making a mockery of the leader of Italy who came to see Volpe’s show. However, that leader happens to be the real-life dictator Benito Mussolini.

Pinocchio’s song goes over predictably poorly, and he’s immediately shot. It’s played for laughs and feels more like a shepherd’s hook yanking Pinocchio off-stage than a cruel firing line, but del Toro’s well-documented concern with fascism has been shown in many of his films, including Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. It may be a funny scene in Pinocchio, but it’s also a disturbing reminder by Guillermo del Toro of what real horrors are occurring in his Pinocchio.

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Pinocchio & The Boys Are Trained For War (Not Pleasure Island)

Del Toro’s Young Men Learn How To Kill

In most versions of Pinocchio, the titular puppet is seduced into going to Pleasure Island, where little boys can do all the bad things they dream of, only to realize too late that their real fate is to be turned into donkeys for labor. In Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, the wooden boy is sent to boot camp in the Italian Army. During training, the boy soldiers are bombed, and many men and children are killed. It’s a harrowing and disturbing scene made more palatable by the fact some of the boys defend Pinocchio.

Violence in children’s stories is not unheard of. Many Disney villains have met their fates in awful ways. However, showing the effects of a real war, and by extension the actual brutality inflicted by armies in the current world, makes the violence in Pinocchio of a particularly disturbing strain.

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Volpe Tries To Immolate Pinocchio

Pinocchio Is Nearly Burnt At The Stake By A Murderous Ringmaster

Just when Pinocchio seems safe after the bombs drop on the training ground. Volpe reappears to take revenge on the puppet who humiliated him in front of Mussolini and ruined his circus. His vengeance takes the form of burning Pinocchio alive. In one of the most disturbing visuals of the film, Pinocchio is tied up to a cross in a clear reference to Jesus Christ, a figure Pinocchio was curious about earlier in the film.

It’s horrifying to see Volpe glaring at what’s essentially a child, as he stokes a fire beneath his strung-up body, and Pinocchio can feel everything. Even when Pinocchio is rescued by the abused monkey, Spazzatura (Cate Blanchett), the distressing scene is not over and Volpe falls off the cliff and hits a rock with a clear squelch​​​​​​ that doesn’t leave much to the imagination.

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Pinocchio Kills The Terrible Dogfish

The Sea Creature Explodes Via Naval Landmine

Monstro has always been one of the scarier whales in movies, but Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio ratchets the animal’s freakiness up a few notches. In this film, Monstro is known as the Terrible Dogfish, which is book-accurate. “Monstro” is a creation of Disney, but both creatures share the same purpose. The Terrible Dogfish is frightening on its own, but it’s the way Pinocchio defeats it that makes the scene so disturbing. The puppet lures the sea monster into swallowing a naval bomb and sacrifices himself to activate it.

The bomb explodes and so does the Terrible Dogfish in as much violent animation as a children’s stop-motion film can produce. Chunks of flesh rain down on Geppetto, Sebastian, and Spazzatura, and though the friends (sans one) are safe, it’s still a disturbingly visceral moment.

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Pinocchio Gives His Life To Save Geppetto

Geppetto Has To Watch His Child Die All Over Again

When the Terrible Dogfish explodes, it sends Geppetto falling to the bottom of the ocean. Back in the realm of death, Pinocchio demands from the sphinx-like creature that he be allowed to return at once to save his father. His wish is granted, but in return, Pinocchio loses his immortality and perishes for good. As the Wood Sprite explains in one of Pinocchio‘s most powerful quotes, “Real boys don’t come back.” Pinocchio has died multiple times throughout the film, but this time feels permanent.

With how many people have died in the movie previously, it wouldn’t be a major surprise for del Toro to kill off his main character at the end of the film, making Geppetto cradling his son’s lifeless head a more disturbing and heartbreaking moment than it had been at the beginning of the movie.

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A Bittersweet Ending For Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio

Pinocchio Goes On Living While Everyone He Knows Dies

Only Guillermo del Toro could use a children’s movie to explore the implications of what a life lived as an immortal would entail. The end of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio sees the puppet alive, though still not a real boy. However, that is no longer the point and he, Geppetto, and Spazzatura live out their days together happily. As time passes, Geppetto dies, soon followed by Sebastian and Spazzatura, and Pinocchio decides to roam the earth alone, waiting for his time to come.

This scene has some very disturbing implications regarding life and death and what Sebastian’s wish to make Pinocchio come alive actually means for the puppet. In Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, he never does get to become a real boy. He experiences much of what a real boy does, but like the Wood Sprite and Death before him, he is something not quite of this world.