Academy Award winners Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis, whose first collaboration was the 1994 smash hit “Forrest Gump,” reunite for the fourth time with “Pinocchio,” Disney’s latest live-action remake of one of its animated classics, in this case the studio’s ground-breaking 1940 film. The results, mixing CGI and live-action, are a mixed bag of boyish fear and yearning, sentiment, frightening action, tedious exposition and middling music by Zemeckis regular Alan Silvestri.
Based on the much-adapted tale by Italian author Carlo Collodi (We have an edgier “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” headed our way soon and enjoyed Matteo Garrone’s 2019 live-action dark fantasy “Pinocchio.”), this new “Pinocchio” uses the 1940 film as its template to a fault. Pinocchio the puppet, voiced in a grating, high pitch by English lad Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (“The Haunting of Bly Manor”), looks the patented way he does in the animated film. The difference is that Geppetto is a real man, instead of an animated figure voiced by an actor (Austrian-born Christian Rub in the 1940 film). Speaking with some inexplicable accent, Joseph Gordon-Levitt voices the beloved Jiminy Cricket, the talking humanoid insect that becomes Pinocchio’s friend and “conscience.” Like Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket, who was memorably voiced by Cliff Edwards in the 1940 film, is a dead ringer for his 1940 self. A 19th-century Italian village is once again the setting. Singer-actor Cynthia Erivo ably plays the Blue Fairy in this version. That’s Lorraine Bracco aka Dr. Jennifer Melfi of “The Sopranos” as Sofia the friendly Seagull.
As an animated character, Geppetto is a very sentimental figure, something that is oddly amplified in the human version, ironically making Hanks seem even more caricature-like. Unlike Roberto Benigni, who plays the role in the revisionist Garrone version, Hanks is stuck with following the lead of the Disney film. This is the second time Hanks has been saddled with a flawed character in a Zemeckis film if you count the dead-eyed conductor in “The Polar Express” (2004). Geppetto once again has voiceless pets, a black-and-white kitten named Figaro and a weirdly made-up goldfish named Cleo.
