Resist­ing fas­cism with Por­co Rosso and Pinnochio

In sep­a­rate cor­ners of a fan­ta­sy-tinged 1930s Italy, two famous sto­ries play out con­cur­rent­ly. Guiller­mo del Toro’s take on Pinoc­chio sees a pup­pet come to life in a small vil­lage, while on the bor­ders of the coun­try, Hayao Miyazaki’s anthro­po­mor­phic pig Por­co Rosso rests in his Adri­at­ic hideout.

View­ing the coun­try through the eyes of each of these direc­tors pro­vides a pro­found­ly dif­fer­ent pic­ture styl­is­ti­cal­ly. Miyazaki’s pro­tag­o­nist is a war vet­er­an, dis­en­fran­chised by nation­al­ism and mak­ing a liv­ing off boun­ty hunt­ing. Del Toro’s Pinoc­chio is a walk­ing, talk­ing new­born, a ball of ener­gy and won­der. Despite this, the two are in agree­ment ide­o­log­i­cal­ly. Both del Toro and Miyaza­ki use the set­ting of Mussolini’s Italy to dis­par­age the idea of fascism.

In the west we like to treat fas­cism as some­thing that died after WWII, but recent events across Europe and the Amer­i­c­as have shown this to not be the case. Italy’s new gov­ern­ment is full of Mus­soli­ni sup­port­ers, Brazil’s lat­est elec­tion was a fight to retain rights for the LGBTQ+ com­mu­ni­ty as well as the indige­nous pop­u­la­tion, and the views of UK Home Sec­re­tary, Suel­la Braver­man, are fear-induc­ing for any­one with non-British ancestors.

An under­stand­ing of who the vic­tims of fas­cism are, what it’s like to exist under a fas­cist régime and how to resist the lurk­ing threat of fas­cism should be com­mon knowl­edge, but so many of us refuse to learn from our his­to­ry. Whether it’s Miyazaki’s colour­ful, hand-drawn mas­ter­piece or del Toro’s dark­er, worn stop-motion spec­ta­cle, it remains dev­as­tat­ing­ly essen­tial for these sto­ries to be told again.

As vehi­cles to rep­re­sent rebel­lion, Pinoc­chio and Por­co occu­py oppo­site ends of a spec­trum. Pinoc­chio is essen­tial­ly a new-born. His first musi­cal num­ber in del Toro’s film is a bal­lad ded­i­cat­ed to learn­ing the names of every­day objects and an ode to child­like won­der. Mean­while, Por­co Rosso is a world-weary war vet­er­an who is extreme­ly aware of the sys­tems in place around him and active­ly looks to lead a qui­et, inde­pen­dent life.

Pinocchio’s rebel­lion comes from his naïveté. With no con­cept of what fas­cism is, and there­fore the pub­lic order which is expect­ed of him, he is free to see the world as a play­ground. He came into the world with a bound­less curios­i­ty and a desire to explore a coun­try where every­one else is too ter­ri­fied to step out of their des­ig­nat­ed paths. Pinocchio’s repeat­ed igno­rance of the pleas from those around him to ​“obey” is rebel­lion against Mussolini’s fas­cism, despite how unin­ten­tion­al it seems.

Age and jad­ed­ness breeds rebel­lion for Por­co Rosso. His exploits as an Ital­ian fight­er pilot in WWI saw him end up as the sole sur­vivor of his squadron and inex­plic­a­bly cursed to live out the rest of his days as a pig. This curse can be read as the survivor’s guilt and PTSD he car­ries from the war. He has been on the front lines of the worst human­i­ty has had to offer, and can imme­di­ate­ly recog­nise fas­cism for what it is. Por­co made a life for him­self as a sea­plane-fly­ing boun­ty hunter oper­at­ing from a hide­out in the Adri­at­ic Sea – a rare show of inde­pen­dence under a fas­cist sys­tem. Retreat­ing from main­land Italy, Por­co is able to main­tain his sense of self in a sys­tem that wants to put him in a box.

The Euro­pean set­ting for both sto­ries is con­ducive to their alle­gories about racism, and how racism is weaponized by fas­cism to pro­tect order. Both of our pro­tag­o­nists have dis­tinct visu­al fea­tures that oth­er them in every set­ting. For all the talk­ing ani­mals and mys­ti­cal fairies that exist in Pinoc­chio, the pup­pet is still described as an ​“abom­i­na­tion.” Even Miyaza­ki plays down the mag­i­cal real­ism to set a clear bound­ary between the harsh real­ism of fas­cist Italy and the half-man half-pig at the cen­tre of his story.

“Pig” is as close to a slur as you’ll hear in a Miyaza­ki movie. Its func­tion in Por­co Rosso is to oth­er and insult Por­co, spat from the mouths of the sea­plane pirates who Por­co fre­quent­ly thwarts. Part­ly due to self-loathing and part­ly due to self-con­fi­dence, Por­co reclaims the word ​“Pig”, inter­nal­is­ing it and using it to cel­e­brate his dif­fer­ences from the Mus­soli­ni-wor­ship­ping humans around him. Emblem­at­ic of this mes­sage is a con­ver­sa­tion Por­co has with a fel­low pilot and Ital­ian army sergeant who encour­ages him to seek the pro­tec­tion of the Ital­ian mil­i­tary. To his pleas, Por­co responds with the icon­ic line ​“Bet­ter a pig than a fascist.”

The mir­a­cle of Pinocchio’s exis­tence is imme­di­ate­ly damp­ened by Gepetto’s hor­ror at his cre­ation, lat­er joined by the rest of his vil­lage. His human­i­ty is called into ques­tion as calls for his death and ref­er­ences to the boy as ​“it” and ​“thing” flow from vil­lagers’ lips. As with Por­co, words are used to cast shame on Pinoc­chio for his exis­tence as any­thing oth­er than the white mono­lith of fas­cist Italy.

West­ern soci­ety mim­ics this tech­nique of sup­pres­sion to this day, plac­ing labels on minori­ties that damp­en their per­ceived worth to soci­ety. Pinoc­chio is free of any sys­tem that pro­grammed him to pre-judge. At the cen­tre of del Toro’s sto­ry is the irony of the lit­er­al pup­pet being the most free in a land of peo­ple on strings from the hands of a fas­cist leader. Our phys­i­cal dif­fer­ences can be emblem­at­ic of ide­o­log­i­cal dif­fer­ences. Fas­cist struc­tures see racial diver­si­ty as a threat to order, sim­ply being a live black or brown per­son is resis­tance to that.

It is dif­fi­cult to label west­ern soci­ety as ​‘pro­gres­sive’ when sto­ries set almost 100 years ago feel like they are press­ing against the neck of the cur­rent estab­lish­ment. Miyaza­ki and del Toro’s films are reminders that we still have so much to learn from our his­to­ry, that lessons expressed through art are just as pow­er­ful as those learned through text­books, and that art has the abil­i­ty to change atti­tudes and shift ideologies.

Por­co Rosso and del Toro’s Pinoc­chio show that rebel­lion against an oppres­sive sys­tem doesn’t have to look the same, in fact, the wider the range of rebel­lion the bet­ter. The films also show how the weapons of fas­cism hit hard­est on the backs of minori­ties, reflect­ing how entrenched in the cycle of ris­ing fas­cism we are today.

Art that reminds us why we resist, and how we resist, should be used as a roadmap through the com­ing years of polit­i­cal dis­course. Fas­cism breeds on belief in the sys­tem over belief in the self – Por­co Rosso and Pinoc­chio tell us that the lat­ter is for­ev­er more important.