You may know the story of Pinocchio, but you’ve never seen him like this before. In Guillermo del Toro’s new stop-motion fantasy, the filmmaker brings a familiar puppet to life in a whole new way. You can check out a new trailer for the lavish adaptation above.

Set in Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio filters Carlo Collodi’s original Italian novel through del Toro’s typically gothic lens. This filmmaker’s puppet is carved from the wood of a tree that grew over a young boy’s grave. When the boy’s father, Geppetto (David Bradley), wishes for a child to be returned to him, he gets a bit more than he bargained for with Pinocchio (young performer Gregory Mann), a scraggly and unfinished wooden mannequin who happily injects an element of pure chaos into his new father’s life. 

“The main conflict within Geppetto and Pinocchio is that Geppetto wanted Carlo, who was a very well-behaved, very docile kid, and he doesn’t quite get Pinocchio, who is rowdy and wild and exuberant,” del Toro told Vanity Fair in June. The Oscar-winning director sees his Pinocchio as an opportunity to both pay tribute to the original story and correct its more old-fashioned messaging. “The virtue Pinocchio has is to disobey,” del Toro told Vanity Fair. “At a time when everybody else behaves as a puppet — he doesn’t.” 

The film also stars Tilda Swinton, Cate Blanchett, Christoph Waltz, and frequent collaborator Ron Perlman. Del Toro directed and co-wrote it with Over the Garden Wall creator Patrick McHale. 

Pinocchio comes to life only on Netflix this holiday season, but don't expect the new film to skew too closely to the “I want to be a real boy” pining of previous Pinocchio movies — this incarnation will be something otherworldly.