Honestly, I think the problem is that I find Guillermo del Toro to be highly overrated as a filmmaker. This is not to say he hasn’t made good films - I remain, inevitably, a big fan of Pan’s Labyrinth - but Pacific Rim was hollow, The Shape Of Water had a genuinely abysmal screenplay, and Nightmare Alley was under-baked and charmless. I found it hard to get excited about his adaptation of Pinocchio, and I was right to, generally. It’s not helped by its proximity to last year’s Disney live action adaptation, because inevitably, plot-wise it’s hard to differentiate the two. The key difference is the stop-motion animation, which does to be fair include some strong character design and is quite nicely stylised. But predictably enough, del Toro goes to the same wells he always does, and it’s not long before Mussolini is here and suddenly Pinocchio is fighting the fascists. It’s Guillermo del Toro doing Guillermo del Toro almost to the level of an SNL sketch about “what if Guillermo del Toro did Pinocchio?” This - as if it needed saying - is not a compliment. The acolytes will bang on about it as another triumph, but the puppet is dancing to the same old tunes.