The plot of “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio,” a film available on Netflix, centres around an elderly man and a wooden puppet he created that comes to life. Years after losing his son in the First World War, Geppetto fashions a puppet in his likeness. An entirely new chapter in Geppetto’s life starts when this puppet comes to life. This tale is told to the audience by a cricket named Sebastian. It makes fitting that he is the one telling Pinocchio’s story because he turns out to be a crucial component of it. However, a twist that occurs after the movie has ended gives the story a whole different angle. What that mid-credits sequence meant is as follows. Spoilers follow!
Who was Sebastian Narrating the Story to?
Pinocchio by Guillermo del Toro opens with a storyteller. His voice welcomes us to the planet that Pinocchio will soon call home. This voice is the one that describes Geppetto, his son Carlo’s tragic death, and the tree that stands next to the boy’s grave. It is discovered that Sebastian the cricket is the storyteller. He has travelled far and is a wanderer. He intends to live inside a hole in Carlo’s tree and write his story there in privacy.
When a wasted Geppetto chops down the tree and fashions a puppet out of it, Sebastian’s world is turned upside down. Later, a supernatural spirit brings this puppet to life. She strikes a bargain with Sebastian in which he is required to watch over the child and ensure his success. She will offer the cricket one wish in exchange for this, during which time he may ask her for anything he desires. It makes natural that Sebastian is the narrator given how involved he is in Pinocchio’s tale from the very beginning. His status as a narrator is strengthened by the fact that he works as a storyteller. The viewer of the movie is taken for Sebastian’s audience at all times. He eliminates the distance between the audience and Pinocchio by speaking directly to us, bringing the events in his life closer to us and amplifying their effect.
Sebastian eventually discloses that Geppetto and Spazzatura passed away over time after Pinocchio and his loved ones have survived all the adventures. Sebastian also passed away somewhere in between. Since he is the narrator and was anticipated to live to the very end, the news of his death is unexpected. However, one doesn’t pay much attention to it because it isn’t something that hasn’t happened in other stories before. That is, until one of the Black Rabbits is heard as the credits begin to roll.
In this scenario, Sebastian is playing cards with the four Black Rabbits who are sitting outside Death’s door in the Underworld. Sebastian is asked to stop chatting and play his card by one of them. Although this is a funny sequence, it lends additional significance to the disclosure of Sebastian’s passing and his position as the storyteller. This indicates that he was not narrating the story to the movie’s audience the entire time. He was telling the Black Rabbits this tale, so by the time we first heard his voice at the beginning of the movie, he had passed away.
Sebastian must have entered the Underworld after passing away. Being a storyteller and leading a rather interesting life, he was compelled to share this tale whenever he found an audience. The fact that he invited himself to a card game with the bunnies wouldn’t be a surprise. He began talking and telling them the Pinocchio story as soon as he took a seat next to them.
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