Pinocho

In a small village, a lonely woodworker named Geppetto (Tom Hanks) makes a wish upon a star for his wooden puppet to be a real boy. A kind Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) answers his wish and gives life to Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) but says to him if he wishes to be a real boy he'll have to do it himself by proving himself truthful, unselfish, and brave. A cricket named Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is assigned by the Blue Fairy to be Pinocchio's conscience with the approval of the Blue Fairy, and Geppetto is ecstatic to find his wish has come true. It isn't long before Pinocchio while good natured does eventually find himself drawn to the allure of taking shortcuts and partaking in vices while Jiminy tries to keep him on the right track. While Pinocchio is drawn into a world of sinister characters, Jiminy tries to keep him on the straight and narrow. Geppetto sets off to find Pinocchio and eventually Pinocchio must try to rescue his father.

Pinocchio is the latest live-action remake of one of Disney's animated films that has become a major staple of the company as they continue mining the nostalgic value of their time-tested assets. The film is the latest in the Twin Film phenomenon wherein two competing studios release similar projects in a similar period of time and the fact that this is coming out the same year as Guillermo del Toro's long gestating stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio due out on Netflix later this year makes this film seem less like any creatively driven endeavor and more like strategic brand protection on the part of the Walt Disney Company. Now I don't want to throw every live-action Disney remake under the bus as there have been some good ones such as Cinderella, Jungle Book, Christopher Robin and Pete's Dragon that try to take a unique direction with the material, but more often than not you'll get something like Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, or The Lion King which are only trying to recapture the animated films down to pretty much being animated themselves with all the heavy CGI that often goes into making these films. Pinocchio is unquestionably an example of the latter as Robert Zemeckis continues his slump and follows up his underwhelming The Witches remake with a remake that may be even worse.

I will say one good thing about Pinocchio in that Tom Hanks is trying to give a good performance as Geppetto and upon initial introduction there was an attempt to expand on Geppetto's character and give him more weight as a character in comparison to the original where he was a kindhearted bumbler, and they try to add something for Hanks to tap into by making him a widower as well as having lost his own son. On the one hand the performance is good (at least in parts) but on the other the fact that Geppetto previously had his own family and lost them opens up some uncomfortable thematic subtext that of course the movie isn't interested in addressing, and when your Disney fairy tale is reminding me of turns taken by Steven Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick's A. I. or Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy/Mighty Atom that actually did try to tap into similar territory except done better (less so in A. I.'s case) it's already a pretty clumsy introduction. Once we're past that we pretty much go through the exact same plot you remember from the original 1940 film with the wide eyed innocent Pinocchio going on a series of misadventures with eccentric characters but even in that respect the movie gets it wrong.

Unlike in other versions of the story where Pinocchio has some level of agency and every misfortune that befalls him is the result of a decision he made ignoring his conscience, Pinocchio has little to no agency in this story as the narrative pushes him towards these misadventures rather than letting him pursue them himself and it makes the episodes Pinocchio encounters far less character based because the misfortunes are no longer in service of teaching Pinocchio a lesson and have lost their original intended purpose. When Pinocchio is sent to Stromboli's for instance, he does initially refuse the temptation, but it's only after being kicked out of school for "being a puppet" that Pinocchio decides to accompany Honest John. A similar thing happens with the Pleasure Island episode where instead of him wanting to go to a land of no rules and excessive vice, he's swiped up from the street against his will and browbeaten into going and even when he does get there he looks pretty revolted by the display of misbehavior and there are long stretches of the movie where Jiminy isn't even with him so why even have Jiminy in this movie if Pinocchio can already tell right and wrong for himself?

Even the nuts and bolts of the movie don't work. Pleasure Island for instance has been scrubbed relatively clean so instead of kids smoking cigars and drinking beer their misbehavior is now drinking root beer and eating mountains of candy but the wanton vandalism is still there so it's now a "genlter" sort of misbehavior....which Pinocchio takes little to no part in. Aesthetically the film feels lifeless and inert. Despite Pinocchio allegedly being made of pine, the overall feeling I got from watching this film was of Rubber and Plastic, something that was both artificial and safe to a fault with absolutely no risk taken and just an excuse for money to be burnt copying a movie that's both widely available and most people already know by heart. While I don't know the budget of this film, given what we know about other Disney remakes this is most likely a very expensive movie but there's a cheapness to the production design because of how over rendered the environments are and despite now being live-action, the film still treats itself as though it were fully animated with Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, Cleo the goldfish, and even Figaro the kitten rendered in CGI that either looks unconvincing or falls into the uncanny valley as is the case with Cleo and Jiminy who look unnerving with their human like faces that mixed with rubbery CGI just look wrong. Pinocchio himself just looks like he's poorly integrated into the scenery and with as much CGI as there is in this movie this is probably the closest these Disney live-action remakes have come to going "full cartoon".

The movie is also a musical, and not a very good one. Robert Zemeckis shows no flair for directing the musical numbers in the film with the renditions of original songs from the original film ranging from mediocre to okay, but the new songs are just unappealing to listen to and they're often awkwardly staged and directed with the Coachman's song in particular just being unappealing on both a visual and auditory level.

Pinocchio is a massive creative failure from Disney. While films such as Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin were also banal and soulless, I could at least appreciate some of the technical craft that went into them. Pinocchio on the other hand not only bungles its lead character and story, but it's also unappealing in both sound and visuals. Both Robert Zemeckis and Disney can do better than this and we know they can do better than this.

"Oh, i just hit my boy of wood with a piece of wood"

Robert Zemeckis' Pinocchio is dire. Most of the CGI characters are hard to look at with Pinocchio being the worst offender. I couldn't imagine buying a toy of this version of Pinocchio, it's rather creepy looking.

The worst part of the movie is the fantasy island part. In the 1940 version, the donkey scenes to this day are terrifying, it really is a trip. Here it's just....nothing. That's probably the best way to describe the movie, a total waste of everyone's time.

Tom Hanks sleepwalks his way throughout the movie, almost as if he's only doing it as a favour to Zemeckis. I had to put the subtitles on for Geppetto as the performance consists mostly of just mutters and grunts. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Jiminy Cricket doesn't have the originals warmth and humour and grates for most of the running time.

Robert Zemeckis has fallen off big time. He used to create original work such as Back To The Future, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Now he directs remakes of The Witches, A Christmas Carol and Pinocchio. Such a waste.

This may be the worst Disney live-action movie. They really need to stop cashing in on their classics with tripe such as this.

On this viewing, Guillermo Del Toro doesn't have much to worry about with his version of Pinocchio. It can't be any worse than this.

Yet another live action adaptation from Disney of one of their beloved cartoon classics. You wonder why they bothered in this instance when most of the characters are CGI anyway with the exception of Tom Hanks, seriously miscast as the eccentric inventor. As usual with these modern-day Disney productions, this is a bland and soulless affair that goes through the motions without ever engaging the senses. It's not quite as long as some of these remakes can be, thankfully, but it fails to stir the senses in every respect and I find it quite telling that the CGI Pinnocchio has less humanity in his eyes than the old animated version.

I'm gonna be honest, I do try my best to tolerate most of the live action remakes. We only got Jungle Book as the only one worth watching, everything else are either decent or just okay. Now the movie is released, I can already see a good reason people will debate this and the 2019 Lion King. The 2022 Pinocchio remake may not be the worst Disney Plus film, but this could be the worst live action Disney remake to date. There are Pinocchio movies out there that do try to find a way to tell the story of the character well. But this is more of a recycled film from the original 1940 one. Despite it does have some of the performances that's fateful to the original film, it had a weak execution with a poorly written story, mediocre characters, overly dark setups, and awful looking visuals. The one thing I'll say the visuals got right is with Pinocchio himself. But for the most part, they can be out of place and most of the designs try way too hard to make animal characters realistic. I mean, we already gotten Ugly Sonic in Chip and Dale. What more do you want to do all that in, Disney Plus? Of course as a painfully pointless live action Disney remake, I recommend to skip this one and stick with the original film. But you know what, let's all be thankful at least we're getting the one by Del Toro at the end of the year. When that gets released, I can guarantee it will be the one you'd want to watch instead. I think Disney should take a break from remaking their classic animated films before they embarrass themselves the more that are made.

Robert Zemeckis is a filmmaker responsible for some of the most colorful, ambitious, and uniquely fanciful films of all time. While his Pinocchio remake is certainly not entirely without its effective moments of visual splendor, it pains me to say that he has continued the trend of live-action Disney remakes that somehow manage to take everything about the original and make it significantly worse.

Every character and setting in this is less expressive and vibrant than it was in 1940, completely draining them of the personality and emotional resonance that once made them so memorable and beautiful.

The voice performances are lacklustre, to say the least. Every line of dialogue from Jiminy and Pinocchio is delivered with the exact same tone of voice. There is no variety to emotions, so the stakes are never clear.

Monstro the whale is not built up at all in this version, so any sense that he is a feared, menacing presence is gone. The tension is nonexistent in the finale. The story's other villainous characters are equally disappointing, coming across as goofy and incompetent rather than calculating and manipulative.

Worst of all, there are some narrative changes made in this version, and all of them make the themes of consequence and repentance lose their meaning and weight.

In this film, Pinocchio never has any moments when he learns the negative consequences of lying, stealing, and self-indulgence like he did in the original. He seems to know these things from the get-go, and he only finds himself in the marionette show and on pleasure island because of circumstance rather than by deliberate choice.

Outside of a couple of visually creative scenes, this is a shallow, soulless copy of a once-profound story. Not to mention that it comes across as insultingly disingenuous, as we all know quite well that Disney executives today don't actually know or care about the difference between right and wrong.