The Terrible Dogfish is the secondary antagonist in the 2022 Netflix stop-motion animated musical fantasy film Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which is based on Gris Grimly's designs from his 2002 edition of the late Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio.
It is an enormous, monstrous, dogfish-like sea creature that emerges from the abyss every decade or so, swallowing anything and anyone unfortunate enough to cross its path. It is based on its original counterpart from the original Pinocchio story.
Biography[]
Past[]
The Terrible Dogfish is an ancient, gigantic sea creature the size of twenty ships. It lives in a gulf of sea by Italy, sleeping in the abyss and emerging every decade or so to devour ships, sailors and anything that it encounters. Due to the dogfish, the strait is given the reputation of a graveyard.
Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio[]
Geppetto and Sebastian encounter the dogfish when they ask a sailor to take them across the Gulf during their search for Pinocchio, due to Pinocchio performing on the other side. The sailor warns them of the dogfish but Sebastian dismisses him as a children's story and Geppetto, so desperate to find Pinocchio, is undeterred and pays him all his has to take him.
Geppetto and Sebastian take the ship, but are lost at sea and then devoured by the dogfish. They get imprisoned in the beast's stomach and survive by eating fish inside its stomach. Following the deaths of Count Volpe and the Podestà, Pinocchio and Spazzatura would later be devoured by the creature, and they would reunite with Geppetto and Sebastian. Sebastian then gives Pinocchio an idea and Pinocchio lies to make his nose grow into a large branch, forming a bridge allowing them to escape out of the monster's blowhole. The Terrible Dogfish then attempts to devour them all again, but Pinocchio sacrifices himself by setting off a naval mine inside the monster, killing the Terrible Dogfish by blowing it up.
Physical Appearance[]
The Terrible Dogfish is not a whale but an enormous dogfish-like creature, more similar to the creature from the original book. The Dogfish is incredibly large and grotesque. It consists of anglerfish-like fins, two blowholes, an ugly and aggressive face and a tail akin to kaiju. It has many rows of sharp teeth.
Personality[]
The Terrible Dogfish is a hungry predator that devours anything that it comes across. It is incredibly aggressive and cruel, becoming infuriated when its prey escapes it and angrily tries to devour them once again.
Trivia[]
- This version of the Terrible Dogfish is more kaiju-like in the film rather than a whale or a shark, complete with two blowholes like old depictions of whales and dolphins.
- In the original book, the Terrible Dogfish is an asthmatic yet neutral sea creature who didn't swallow Geppetto out of malice, but more out of indifference. Here, akin to its Disney counterpart and remake counterpart, the Terrible Dogfish becomes angry at Geppetto, Pinocchio, Spazzatura and Sebastian for escaping from it and chases after them with the intent to swallow them again.
- Unlike its original counterpart who keeps living its life as usual after Geppetto and Pinocchio escape from it during nighttime (not even noticing that they escaped due to it being asleep when they did), this version of the Terrible Dogfish is killed after it gets blown up from the inside due to Pinocchio tricking it into swallowing a naval mine.
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 Villains
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