It’s hard to convey how disappointed I am in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, currently streaming on Netflix. I had high hopes for it. I like stop-motion animated film in general, and this promised to be such an inventive one, especially welcome in these times of rote animated films like Disney’s Strange World and Netflix’s Scrooge: A Christmas Carol. But I must confess that I disliked it intensely.

It’s a handsome, elaborate, well-crafted production overall, the result of tremendously intensive labor, as is typical of stop-motion animated films, and there are awesome effects such as the plunges into the sea when the protagonists are trying to escape the huge Terrible Dogfish that is trying to swallow them whole. The distractingly starry cast of voice actors includes Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton, Christoph Waltz, and Ewan McGregor, and, in smaller roles, Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfhard, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson, Burn Gorman, and Tom Kenny (the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants). It indicates del Toro’s prestige and the high level of production value in the film in general.

But the overall effect is so plot-congested, lugubrious, morbid, and off-putting that it took me three tries just to watch it all the way through.