• Netflix

Fun fact about the original 1883 book Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi: The first time the unnamed talking cricket appears to the living puppet and lectures him about good behavior, Pinocchio straight-up murders him with a hammer. It's understandable that this particular detail didn't make it into Walt Disney's 1940 animated feature, or most other subsequent versions of the story, but it also points out how ripe the text could be for a variety of other interpretations. So the fact that Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is appearing in a year that has already seen another crack at the Disney-familiar tale shouldn't inspire a knee-jerk response of, "Really? Another one?" Instead, the only important questions are, "What does this one do that carves out (pun intended) a unique space, and are those things interesting?"

It's already a perfect creative choice that co-writer/co-director Del Toro, in collaboration with Jim Henson Productions, made it a piece of stop-motion animation, telling the story of a puppet with puppets. But that's just the beginning of the uniquely dark roads this Pinocchio opts to journey down. It becomes a tale of (among other things) death, grief, loss of faith and rejection of fascism. And as it spins its way through a mix of dark corners and musical production numbers, it turns a lot of familiar components into something utterly distinctive.

Take, just for instance, the origin story of Pinocchio (voiced by Gregory Mann) at the hands of woodcarver Geppetto (David Bradley). Much like this year's Robert Zemeckis/Disney Pinocchio, del Toro, his co-writers and co-director Mark Gustafson (animation director for Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox) tie the puppet's creation to the death of a biological son. This, however, is no whimsical act of love; a drunken, heartbroken Geppetto practically hate-builds Pinocchio as an expression of his despair. Connect this with a Geppetto who says grace over his meals with his human son and lovingly crafts the crucifix for the town church before the boy's tragic death, then leaves the damaged figure of Christ unrepaired after that death, and you've got the story of someone creating a life as a rebellion against God.

Or consider how del Toro handles the character of the talking cricket, here named Sebastian (Ewan McGregor). The role he plays is essentially the same as the one that we associate with Jiminy—attempting to serve as Pinocchio's moral instructor—but he also endures much more slapstick buffeting about, very much more in keeping with the fate of his original literary counterpart. There's an attempt to set Sebastian up as somewhat puffed-up character interested in being a writer, but it's one of the less successful components that this story tries to give him a little bit of an arc of his own of learning selflessness, when that seems to be his personality almost from the outset.

The most intriguing original twist comes with setting this version of the story in 1930s Italy, during the regime of Benito Mussolini. Il Duce himself actually makes an appearance, to scatological comedic effect, but his physical presence matters less than what he represents as part of Pinocchio's moral development. He's surrounded by adults who are either self-serving appeasers like carnival entrepreneur Volpe (Christoph Waltz) and the parish priest (Burn Gorman) or true believers like the father (Ron Perlman) of Pinocchio's friend Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard). There's a particularly unsettling sequence in which Pinocchio, Candlewick and other young boys are trained to be soldiers for the Italian army, essentially replacing the more familiar Pleasure Island sequence. In this instance, however, the action becomes even more disturbing, because it's less about what children devolve into when left without adult supervision, but what children can be shaped into by adults steeped in cruelty and hate.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio includes enough recognizable elements—like a blue fairy (Tilda Swinton) and time spent in the belly of a sea monster—that viewers are hardly starting from scratch in grasping the source material. And there are times when trying to fold a lot of different material into this story, including original songs, gives it a slightly over-stuffed feeling. Connecting it all, however, is a remarkable visual design unafraid of darker overtones, and a determination to give this Pinocchio its own singular vision. That only requires killing an attachment to previous interpretations, and not even necessarily killing a cricket.