INTO THE PENUMBRA: ON GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO AND CINEMATIC MYTH-TELLING Once upon a time... Happily ever after... In a land far far away... These are phrases that we immediately associate with fairy tales. Fairy tales, as it goes, are typically regarded (or, better said, disregarded) as children’s stories. According to J. R. R. Tolkien, however, this is a profound misprision, mostly predicated upon the idea that children are more credulous than adults— that they are, as it were, gullible enough to believe in the bits and pieces of entertaining nonsense handed down to them as a form of cultural inheritance, moral instruction, or whathaveyou. For Tolkien, this amounts to a gross misunderstanding both of fairy tales and children. 6/30/2026
Thus, just as it is part of the work of any serious person to cultivate in him or herself the capacity to understand things like history, music, and science, it is also incumbent upon the serious person to cultivate what appreciate he or she can for the fairy tale. This means, first of all, learning to take such stories seriously—not as mere historical oddities or baubles (the grandmother gets eaten by a wolf in this one! The black worm prince burns all of his potential brides to a crisp in this other!)—but as ways of thinking earnestly and intelligently about the world, or of learning to experience it anew. 6/30/2026 “Actually,” he writes, The association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the “nursery,” as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class [...] neither like fairystories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairystories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate. It is true that in recent times fairy-stories have usually been written or “adapted” for children. But so may music be, or verse, or novels, or history, or scientific manuals.
Both concern a world beyond mere human choice and agency, for one. Furthermore, both are handed down and modified and rediscovered (again and again) over generations. Also, both concern an enchanted (or, now, in the wake of modernity and the partial realization of Max Weber’s well- known disenchantment thesis) re-enchanted world. And, finally, both transcend questions of form, medium, art, and discipline—such that music, literature, astronomy, geography, religion, dance, and so on all share an equal claim to inherit them. What I hope to do over the next few minutes is discuss cinema’s claim to this inheritance. And, in particular, the way that this claim arises in the works of the Mexican auteur, Guillermo del Toro. 6/30/2026 Another category that comes into play here is myth. There are definite differences between fairy tales and myths that should be respected (e.g., their respective truth claims, for one) but there are also certain similarities between them that, I think, justify my treating them as a couple for the span of this short project.
The f ilm critic Michael Atkinson writes that Guillermo del Toro has what he terms a “Grimmian” sensibility. By this, Atkinson apparently means that del Toro’s films carry themselves like myths or fairy tales, much in the same way that the ancient stories famously transcribed by the Brothers Grimm in the nineteenth century. This point leads Atkinson to further enquire whether del Toro is not a “folk artist”—not in the sense that he reprises antiquated forms or embodies a kind of pre-industrial native spirit, but in the sense that he is “a toiler in the fields of fable.” This, to me, seems a good starting place for understanding something of the significance of del Toro’s idiosyncratic approach to cinema: namely, that his f ilms grow out of “the f ields of fable.” 6/30/2026 Insofar as this is true, it means that what del Toro does is different from what the bulk of mainstream filmmakers do: i.e., he tells stories that bear a kind of sacred longevity, which aspire to timelessness and truth as opposed to relevance and innovation.
By contrasting del Toro’s works with narrative humanism, I am saying that they do not adhere to the principles of what has, more or less, been the dominant mode of storytelling in the west since the Renaissance. The underlying assumption of narrative humanism is that our stories are basically about us—our feelings, our psychologies, our inner and outer lives. And it assumes, further, that our stories come from us, which means that they are neither implicated in, nor responsible to, any larger or higher order. As Manuel Cabrera Jr. writes, the specif ic idea of humanism which undergirds this view of “story” holds that the world is basically “the venue in which we lead our lives.” Consequently, he says, “Everything about us is caught up in the all-consuming project of figuring out how to conduct our existence— what to do, be, believe, and feel. Nothing can matter except in terms of how it bears on this endeavor.” 6/30/2026 Another way of interpreting this is to say that, like most weavers of myth and lore, del Toro tells stories that are not perfectly secular, disenchanted works of narrative humanism. They are, instead, stories that situate the human being within the fabric of a large and vital more-than-human order.
But myths and fairy tales, for the most part, do not share this assumption. These older modes of storytelling operate by situating the realm of human experience within a broader cosmic order. In myth, human beings are enmeshed in worlds of naiads, dryads, kami, fairies, and gods. And while it is generally possible to smuggle a version of the story’s meaning back into our immanent frame (we sometimes refer to this smuggled-out aspect as the “moral” of the story), certain dimensions of the story—the way it provokes us to wonder, the way it renders the world in equal measures intelligent and intelligible, the way it makes us at home, for example—will simply, tantalizingly, remain beyond the limits of what we, in our psychologized model of the human, find acceptable. 6/30/2026
If they are not properly ours, then this puts constraints on the ways in which one may handle them. One is not free to contort or dissect such stories, for example, because one considers each retelling to be an act of collaboration with the story itself. (Obviously, myths and fairy tales change over time and reflect changing realities. This is not to imply otherwise.) The idea is simply that myth conceives of itself as a living story. And myth- tellers, by extension, tend to think of themselves as providing a home for something living. Thus, however one changes a story in the telling, one at least takes care not to kill or maim it. (Because, ultimately, one thinks it is possible to do so—i.e., to kill or maim it.) 6/30/2026 The f inal difference between myth and fairy tales, on the one hand, and what I am calling narrative humanism, on the other, is the issue of anthropogenesis, which is to say the issue of origins or sources. Today we are largely unanimous in our assumption that stories come from human beings. In myth, however, there remains a possibility that the muses will sing in you, that stories will be written in the stars or a landscape, or that some eternal truth may give itself, or express itself, in the form of a story. These stories may not be ours, exactly.
This brings us to the question of how things like myth and fairy tales come to film, and specifically to f ilms like Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2023). Cinema is, in some ways, especially suited to expressing the kind of porosity of the human self that I have just been saying undergirds or bears out the possibilities of myth. One can hardly forget the way that Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), for example, draws an implicit connection between the disturbed consciences of the men huddling beneath the Rashomon Gate and the torrential rains pouring down on them—nor, for that matter, the way that the ruined gate itself expresses something of the ruined, fragmentary, porously-framed narratives that the men tell. 6/30/2026
Neither can one forget how the success of Sergei Eisenstein’s famous milk separator sequence in The General Line (1929) rides on what Eisenstein, himself, describes as his ability to “instill pathos” between shots of the machine and shots of the onlooking peasants. As the milk separator whirs to life, the peasants’ reactions and the speed of the editing lend it a sense of intelligence, vitality, and emotion that it could not otherwise have—but then the opposite is also true: i.e., that the whirring of the machine expresses something of the excitement and crumbling incredulity behind the eyes of the peasants. So we do have a sense in film that each shot, let me say, expresses some development of the same overarching train of thought, such that human beings are naturally—as if to say seamlessly, almost unremarkably— connected to “the stuff of earth,” so to speak. 6/30/2026
In light of her own memories of working on her parents’ apiary as a child, as well as the thematization of bees in her 2014 film, The Wonders [or, in Italian, Le meraviglie—“the miracles”], Rohrwacher muses that [Bees] have an incredible mystery to them, just like cinema. [...] Although we can study and analyze films, they have their own autonomous force and mystery, like a hive [...]. Bees are animals who want above all to be free, who you can only woo with sweetness, but which you can’t own. The basis of their work is freedom. 6/30/2026 The Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher has, at several points, described her own films as fairy tales. There are a number of ideas at play in this description: that her films are dreamlike, for one; that they pulse with an almost kaleidoscopic glide of symbols and associations; that they are quiet, somehow ancient, and hum with mystery. For Rohrwacher, the “fairy tale” descriptor is both a thematic/aesthetic concern and a principle of craft.
6/30/2026 In terms of style, it will be hard to make any strong connection between Rohrwacher’s idea of filmmaking and the work that del Toro does. Pinocchio is a stop-motion animated film, after all, and the material conditions of stop-motion require a level of involvement and precision that all-but-necessarily precludes the kind of Bazinian revelationism, or loving attention to nature, that characterizes Rohrwacher’s work. But there is an almost overwhelming similarity between the two filmmakers in terms of their common respect for the autonomy and mystery and the Other—whether that be nature, a person, or the transcendent/divine.
The unique power of del Toro’s cinema lies in showing us, by means of explicitly extraordinary examples, that these are, in fact, some of the most ordinary dilemmas in human life. Think, for example, how the villainy of the fascist Podestà (Ron Perlman) in Pinocchio derives, time and again, from some extension of his principle tendency to deny the inviolable mysteriousness and, shall we say, sanctity of others’ lives. Upon being confronted with the reality of Pinocchio (a being who is pointedly, on several occasions, brought into comparison with Jesus Christ), the Podestà’s only concern is how best to instrumentalize or conform him. The fact that he eventually decides that Pinocchio should become an instrument of war tells us something about the particular relationship of knowledge and power that del Toro is critiquing. 6/30/2026 Del Toro has spoken of Pinocchio as a version or variation of the Frankenstein story, which is, itself, about a process much like filmmaking. In each case, a mysterious and non-human force of life finds its way into an assemblage of parts, an imperfect body, made by human hands. We who have assembled these parts are then faced with the event of what I take to be a fundamentally human responsibility: namely, that of deciding how, or whether, to respond.
That Pinocchio is basically a living work of art should not be lost on us, especially not in this regard. Geppetto (David Bradley) cuts the pine tree over his son’s grave in a fit of grief and rage, then drunkenly fashions the wood into a boy-shaped marionette. This way of beginning can easily amount to horror (and, in fact, this is one reason why del Toro originally took an interest in the Pinocchio story: that it can be a horror, that it opens onto horror). The fact that it does not become what most of us would consider a horror story—much like the fact that Pinocchio himself does not become the horror that his origins suggest—owes to the autonomy and grace of the life which inhabits both works. It should also not be lost on us, however, that what I am calling the “autonomy and grace” of life is not always a welcome thing. 6/30/2026 Geppetto loses patience with Pinocchio’s individuality. The evil Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) struggles, and fails, to commodify Pinocchio—to turn him into an instrument of economic gain, as opposed to war. And, of course, we have the Podestà, who is in equal measures excited by Pinocchio’s immortality and exasperated by the fact that he cannot cause Pinocchio to ply this immortality in service of fascism.
6/30/2026 One might say, in other words, that del Toro’s cinema simultaneously thematizes and embodies what Lovisa Bergdahl, following Walter Benjamin, calls “the double task of the translator: translate me and do not translate me.” In this sense, the ambition to tell reality like a fairy tale or to approach cinema as a means of myth-telling is, at the same time, an ambition to give mystery its proper place in art—to maintain mystery; not so that we can become ignorant but so that mysterious things can be added to our knowledge. Of course, this principle of maintaining mystery opens onto a question which I take to be central both to Pinocchio and del Toro's broader filmography: namely, the question of the divine Other.
At the outset of the film, Geppetto and his beloved son, Carlo, are working together in the sanctuary of their village church during the first world war. As they put the finishing touches on the large wooden crucifix that they are installing, bombs begin to fall from the sky. One of them, landing in the church, kills Carlo (off screen for us, but directly in front of Geppetto). The crucifix, while damaged, remains mostly intact, looming over the scene of Carlo’s death. 6/30/2026
“There’s something I don’t understand,” Pinocchio says, gazing up at the crucifix as Geppetto works. “Everybody likes Him. They were all singing to Him. He’s made of wood, too. Why do [the townspeople] like Him and not me?” To which Geppetto replies, “people are sometimes afraid of things they don’t know.” While Pinocchio is replete with supernatural beings—the Wood Sprite, Death, the Black Rabbits who inhabit the underworld or afterlife—there is no articulation of a Transcendental God anywhere in the film; only, as it were, these beings and Christian icons of an absent God. And it is the ontological description of this absent God—omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, familiar—that the townspeople hold dear, even as they revile or ignore the supernatural forces that are actually in their midst—weak, personal, deferential, strange. 6/30/2026 The narrative moves ahead to the second world war. For years, the crucifix has remained aloft but damaged—one arm severed, the wood somewhat scorched and roughened—at the front of the church; Geppetto has, apparently, in all this time refused to continue working on it. It is only after a supernatural Wood Sprite brings Pinocchio to life and Geppetto begins to love him (in spite of the town’s distrust) that Geppetto agrees, once more, to work on the crucifix. He brings Pinocchio with him.
And interestingly, for Michel de Certeau, that is precisely the overlooked lesson of Christ: “That ‘Other,’ present but also absent, whose ‘Follow me,’ in the penumbra of the empty tomb ‘comes from a voice forever irrecoverable.’” Thus, the ontotheological position that del Toro rightly critiques with his atheism gives way not to apathy or triumphalism, but to a renewed interest in encounter, hospitality, and love. Toward this point, Jean-Luc Marion argues in The Erotic Phenomenon that love presents us with a phenomenological alternative to the founding question of Cartesian metaphysics by enabling us to ask “Am I loved?” rather than “Do I exist?” Thus, by bracketing the problem of existence and turning, instead, toward f irst-person experience Marion effectively replaces the question “To be or not to be?” with the question “Can I love first?” 6/30/2026
While, admittedly, (as in Pinocchio’s case), there is no assurance that my love will be reciprocated, there is absolutely assurance that I can decide to love. And, as Marion puts it, the assurance I find by loving is that “I love decidedly, that I love as a decided lover. [...] I do not become myself when I think, doubt, or imagine [...] I become myself definitively each time and for as long as I, as lover, can love first.” In other words, what we f ind in del Toro’s Pinocchio is a form of cinematic storytelling which “loves” itself into being (as opposed to proving, doubting, or proclaiming itself into being): a cinematic myth, attuned to the mystery, wonder, and possibility of the sacred in the world. 6/30/2026