Can you see the similarity?
Photo: Getty Images / Disney
Guillermo del Toro has been working on a stop-motion version of Pinocchio for nearly a decade, and in 2018, he found a home for the project in Netflix, which is the closest thing we have to Stromboli’s disgusting content factory. And today Netflix announced the cast of the upcoming movie: “Newcomer Gregory Mann” will cast Pinocchio, Ewan McGregor will play Cricket (not Jiminy), and David Bradley, who you may know from Harry Potter as Argus Filch, Geppetto will play. The rest of the cast will include Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Ron Perlman, Tim Blake Nelson, and Burn Gorman. Waltz already essentially played Geppetto Alita: Battle Angel, and he played a sort of Coachman in Django Unchained, so that he is a natural fit. We would love to see Tim Blake Nelson and John Turturro as the leading actors, Finn Wolfhard in Goldfinch mode as a street donkey song, and Tilda as the Blue Fairy, but we’ll have to wait and see what Guillermo has in store for the rest of the cast. This casting announcement comes shortly after the news that Tom Hanks is in negotiations to play a full cuddlier-sounding Geppetto in the live action of Disney Pinocchio film, directed by Robert Zemeckis.
Netflix also released some more information about the premise – it will be set “during the rise of Fascism in Mussolini’s Italy” – so that it already distances itself from Disney’s competitors Pinocchio project, which probably not have a Gestapo element, knows Disney. Netflix also announced that Alexandre Desplat will deliver the score, with Fantastic Mr. Fox ‘s stop-motion genius Mark Gustafson co-director. No word on whether or not it does Pinocchio will follow in the webbed footsteps of the winner of del Toro’s Best Picture The form of water, and have Monstro the whale.
