La muerte de Pinocho
2016 · 20m · España
Directed by Carlos Rufete
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Siel, a six-year-old boy overprotected by his parents, discovers on Christmas Day the true, bitter face of appearances and lies — and that before winning, sometimes one must lose.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A coming-of-age wrapped in Pinocchio's skeleton — fine, expected — but the real move is that it doesn't flinch from the kid actually *staying* broken, doesn't redeem him into wisdom-gained. That's the subversive gear most of these shorts lose their nerve on.
Rufete's deployment of fairy-tale apparatus as formal constraint is precise: each lie, each materialization of consequence becomes a compositional argument about how myth *works* to transmit loss across generations. The melancholy isn't decoration — it's the film's governing aesthetic principle.
The decision to keep the boy's face still, almost blank, while the world of appearances crumbles around him in sound and color — that refusal to perform emotion is what separates this from a dozen other disillusionment narratives, and it costs nothing but nerve.