DIRECTOR: Robert Zemeckis
CAST: Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, Tom Hanks, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cynthia Erivo, Luke Evans, Keegan-Michael Key, Lorraine Bracco, Kyanne Lamaya, Giuseppe Battiston, Lewin Lloyd, Sheila Atim
RUNNING TIME: 105 mins
CERTIFICATE: PG
BASICALLY…: The wooden puppet Pinocchio (Ainsworth) comes to life and gets into a series of misadventures…
NOW FOR THE REVIEW…
Another day, another Disney animated classic needlessly transformed into a hollow-eyed CG extravaganza that isn’t even a patch on the original.
Yes, it’s easy to tear apart Disney’s continuing trend of remaking their cartoon hits into “live-action” (a phrase used sparingly, in that they’re mostly CGI with occasional human characters), and while most of them aren’t particularly great, not all of them have been complete failures, either. Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book is a legitimately great Disney remake, touching upon elements that were present in the animated original while still standing out on its own both visually and narratively, and despite its obvious flaws the 2017 Beauty and the Beast was a harmless retread. However, since most of them have been so underwhelming, and at best forgettable, the overall consensus among hardcore Disney fanatics is that all of them are bad and that Disney should feel bad for making them, which makes it hard to try and defend them somewhat when discussing them with other film fans.
But then, there’s Pinocchio, brought to “life” by director Robert Zemeckis. This was one that I just couldn’t do, and honestly have very little ammunition with which to even give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s pretty bad, sometimes shockingly so, and as far as these Disney remakes go, this might be one of the few I struggled with the most.
You should know the story of Pinocchio by now, but just in case: it all begins as carpenter Geppetto (Tom Hanks), mourning the loss of his young son, constructs a wooden puppet named… oh, take a guess. When Geppetto wishes upon a star, a Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) magically brings Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) to life, and assigns a vagabond cricket named Jiminy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as his conscience, to guide the puppet on a mission to become honest, unselfish, and brave enough to fully transform into a real boy. From there, Pinocchio gets into tons of misadventures, from being goaded into a puppet show by con-fox Honest Joe (Keegan-Michael Key), to being transported to Pleasure Island by a sinister Coachman (Luke Evans), to being swallowed hole by a massive sea monster (read: not whale in this version) named Monstro.
Full disclosure, the original 1940 Pinocchio was a Disney film that I certainly watched as a kid, but maybe once or twice, and never enough to have any real sense of nostalgia or even many fond memories of it. I was much more into the likes of Aladdin and The Lion King than Pinocchio, which mostly faded into obscurity when faced with much more interesting Disney movies to choose from. So, I am not exactly the kind of viewer who goes into Zemeckis’ Pinocchio with a particularly strong connection to the original, but then again I remember enough about that version to know that this one doesn’t even hold its biggest fans to a higher standard. This version, which Zemeckis also co-wrote with Chris Weisz (who also penned Kenneth Branagh’s much better remake of Cinderella), is such a cynical ploy to appease Disney’s own legacy, that there are not one but two instances in this very film that show other Disney movies being re-enacted in Geppetto’s many wooden clocks (see if you too can spot Snow White, Dumbo, Woody from Toy Story, and even Roger Rabbit wrapped in the chest of his busty wife Jessica). At no point do you ever feel that Zemeckis was legitimately trying to do something ambitious or visually interesting with the material, but instead that he was directly following orders from Disney executives that told him exactly how to make this film, right down to making characters like Pinocchio and Jiminy Cricket the splitting image of their original designs, because in their minds no audiences would ever accept anything that was remotely different. I almost feel bad for Zemeckis, because none of his usual spark or enthusiasm seems to be present here, something that even his previous film The Witches managed to capture in some degree, and it wasn’t even that great of a movie.
In terms of remaking the original, it does a Lion King and follows the beats of the animated original step by step, reciting almost the exact same dialogue and slapstick, but in a far more obnoxious and overly showy manner that retains precious little of the original’s grit and soul. It tries retaining some of the old-fashioned vocal deliveries of the original, but what might have worked in 1940 is a lot more grating in 2022, and the overly-upbeat, squeaky-clean voices of Benjamin Evan Ainsworth and especially Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Pinocchio and Jiminy respectively are really annoying to listen to after a while, especially when not even the title character feels like a fully-formed protagonist. It also does what a lot of other Disney remakes do, and pad the story out with plotlines that either go nowhere or feel wildly unnecessary; in this case, it introduces a puppet love interest for Pinocchio, operated by a young woman named Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya), which in theory could work if the writers bothered to invest more time and energy into it, but feels so extra that you could easily cut all of it out and have the movie come out no differently to how it does. The same goes for a newer character, a seagull voiced by Goodfellas’ Lorraine Bracco, who is only there to conveniently give Jiminy Cricket a lift to his next destination, and that’s it. Sometimes, introducing new things into the story can work – again, look at what they did with The Jungle Book – but when there’s already next to nothing holding the rehashed elements together, you can feel just how much longer these newer and pointless things are making it, and it makes it so much more difficult to sit through.
There are moments when you can see that familiar Robert Zemeckis touch – the Pleasure Island sequence is a nightmarish sequence that calls to mind the alternate 1985 from Back to the Future Part II, and God bless Tom Hanks for giving his Forrest Gump and Cast Away director a soothing performance that’s as though he’s out for another Oscar – but this is an empty, heartless and deeply cynical Disney product through and through, designed to milk another one of its IPs for all its worth until it’s all dried up with nothing left. For all that’s good and holy, stick with the original Disney version of Pinocchio, or better yet wait until Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio for Netflix – sure that’s set to have a much darker tone for family audiences, but at least it’s driven by a visionary filmmaker with clear passion and ambition for the source material.
This, on the other hand, is a film that has a scene where its title character stops to smell and admire horse shit in the street. Sums it all up, really.
SO, TO SUM UP…
Pinocchio is a soulless and deeply cynical Disney remake that hits all the familiar beats of the animated 1940 original, but does little else to set itself apart or even give a formidable reason for its existence. In other words, just like most of the other live-action Disney remakes, only this one is a lot more noticeably hollow (and not because the title character’s made of wood).
