If you’re going to take a fresh look at Carlo Collodi’s deathless story about a wooden marionette who’s magically brought to life to help heal the soul of a grieving woodcarver named Geppetto, can you think of a better filmmaker for the task than Guillermo del Toro? The visionary director has appropriately chosen to tackle the tale via a stop-motion musical, and Netflix has delivered the first official teaser. Del Toro co-directs the film alongside Mark Gustafson, and it’s a project that has deep meaning for the Oscar-winning director.

The teaser introduces us to Sebastian J. Cricket (Jiminy Crickett in the original story), our Orthopeteran guide through this new take on Pinocchio. Sebastian J. Cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor) is featured in the main image above, and will no doubt prove a useful guide into what we expect will be a quite different take on the legendary story.

Del Toro has been pursuing the project for years. In a statement when the film was officially greenlit in 2018, he made his passion for the story clear. “No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio. In our story, Pinocchio is an innocent soul with an uncaring father who gets lost in a world he cannot comprehend. He embarks on an extraordinary journey that leaves him with a deep understanding of his father and the real world. I’ve wanted to make this movie for as long as I can remember.”

Del Toro’s Pinocchio is set in Italy during the 1930s, right as Benito Mussolini is consolidating his fascist control of the country. This will be Del Toro’s first Netflix film as director.

McGregor joins a star-studded cast voicing Pinocchio’s characters, including Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz (voicing the fox) Finn Wolfhard (voicing Lampwick), Gregory Mann (voicing Pinocchio), and David Bradley (voicing Geppetto).

Check out the delightful teaser below. Pinocchio arrives on Netflix this coming December.

Here’s the official synopsis from Netflix:

Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro reinvents Carlo Collodi’s classic tale of the wooden marionette who is magically brought to life in order to mend the heart of a grieving woodcarver named Geppetto. This whimsical, stop-motion musical directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson follows the mischievous and disobedient adventures of Pinocchio in his pursuit of a place in the world.

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