The wood­en boy comes to life again in the first trail­er for Guiller­mo del Toro’s Pinocchio

No rest for the wicked, and there aren’t many direc­tors as com­mit­ted to the cause of wicked­ness as Guiller­mo del Toro. The genre-cin­e­ma vet­er­an gave us his fiendish remake of Night­mare Alley mere months ago, and he’s already prepar­ing to roll out anoth­er fea­ture that brings a revi­sion­ist bent to a sto­ry known even more wide­ly, now with a turn toward the macabre.

This morn­ing, the first trail­er for his long-await­ed adap­ta­tion of Pinoc­chio appeared online and offered a peek at a crunchi­er-look­ing, more off-cen­ter alter­na­tive to the show­tune-strewn Dis­ney ver­sion seen far and wide. Accord­ing to the giv­en syn­op­sis, this wood­en boy come to life isn’t the guile­less dork we recall from child­hood, but rather a nasty-tem­pered trou­ble­mak­er who enjoys play­ing mean tricks on those unfor­tu­nate enough to cross his path.

With the voiceover of the mus­ta­chioed Sebas­t­ian J. Crick­et (no rela­tion to Jiminy, though he is voiced by Ewan McGre­gor) as his mouth­piece, del Toro teas­es the main themes of the film, includ­ing love, loss, and ​“imper­fect fathers and imper­fect sons.” Though the footage we do glimpse, which most­ly falls along the lines of pep­py-look­ing adven­ture, seems to bear lit­tle rela­tion to the teas­es about fas­cism in 1930s Italy that del Toro was said to have incorporated.

We do, how­ev­er, get a nice intro­duc­tion to the menagerie of col­or­ful char­ac­ters who’ll meet Pinoc­chio as friends or foes, includ­ing the kind­ly pup­peteer Gep­pet­to (voiced by David Bradley), the nefar­i­ous Count Volpe (voiced by Christoph Waltz), and the Fairy with the Turquoise Hair (Til­da Swin­ton). And yet not a sin­gle glimpse of Sprez­zatu­ra the Mon­key, voiced by Cate Blanchett, the real star of the show here.

Though the real real star of the show would have to be the ani­ma­tion itself, the main draw of a labor-inten­sive stop-motion project such as this one. The hand-carved aes­thet­ic is a can­ny idea, made text with the shot of Gep­pet­to whit­tling his mar­i­onette son, with a more sub­dued col­or palette that could very well hint at the over­all down­beat vibe large­ly obscured by the clip below.

Pinoc­chio will come to Net­flix world­wide in December.