There are two feature-length, big-name Pinocchio films slated for release this year, which is at least one more than any reasonable person might have expected. The version to hand, Robert Zemeckis’s live-action-slash-CGI creation, comes straight from Disney’s magic castle conglomerate, and will be countered by Netflix with a stop-motion fable from Guillermo del Toro (coming to a device near you in December).
That’s not to mention Matteo Garrone’s 2019 Italian-language Pinocchio, featuring Roberto Benigni – who had previously played the titular character in the 2002 film version he himself directed – as the kindly woodcarver Geppetto, father to the little wooden boy.
The people’s appetite for Carlo Collodi’s magical puppet, whose serialised escapades were first published in book form in 1883, is yet to be determined. Even still, maybe this rush of Pinocchios speaks to a fake-news-addled, post-ironic society’s wish – “star light, star bright, first star I see tonight,” to quote Geppetto – for a return to the kind of truth that’s as plain as the nose on your face.
That isn’t to say that Zemeckis’s re-Imagineering of the 1940 Disney classic arrives under conditions that could be called auspicious – certainly the fact that it was shunted to a streaming release suggests less-than-total confidence on the part of the Disney powers that be.
Despite his pioneering work mixing live action with animation (see: Who Framed Roger Rabbit), the director’s latter-day filmography contains a litany of uncanny valley-set clunkers (see: The Polar Express, A Christmas Carol, Beowulf – or maybe don’t).
His most recent offering, an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, did at least skip the creepy mo-cap stuff. Alas, it was not very good.
What a surprise, then, to find that Zemeckis’s Pinocchio is one of the more deft – delightful, even – to have come from either the director or the Disney live-action nostalgia factory of late.
Even with the grain of his material newly made visible, the CGI-ed Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is no wooden screen presence, and Zemeckis regular Tom Hanks appears chuffed to don Geppetto’s brass-buckled shoes and dote upon his de facto son. (That he gives such a warm performance despite having to act against what was likely a tennis ball suggests that the director had a longer game in mind with Cast Away).
Perhaps learning from Tim Burton’s follies in Dumbo (2019), Zemeckis – working from a screenplay he wrote with Chris Weitz – hews pretty close to Disney’s original, refusing the temptation to blow what is ultimately a simple, intimate story right out of proportion, or to inflate the run time beyond the capacity of a fidgety youngster, or indeed adult.
After being kicked out of school on his first day, Pinocchio’s quest to become a “real boy” – by proving himself “brave, truthful, and unselfish” – sees him blunder into a showbiz career, before being whisked off to a dystopian carnival for delinquents and then the high seas, but these dalliances are all brief. (“You did all of this in one day?” bleats Geppetto when reunited with his errant creation.)
Little plot and character modifications work to smooth the old story’s episodic structure, the film chugging along as confidently as the gilded gondola that shepherds our wide-eyed hero through the candy-lined channels of Pleasure Island, even-keeled amongst the whizzing of firecrackers and the smashing of glass.
Things are off and away even before the standard opening graphic of the Disney castle has faded: “Isn’t that a catchy little tune?” sighs Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jiminy Cricket as he glides into frame with umbrella in hand, the orchestral strains of When You Wish Upon a Star – the corporation’s longtime signature melody, originally written for Pinocchio – swelling.
Get past the unnecessary dead son backstory and graceless Disney IP nods of the opening scene – do cowboy Woody and Maleficent really need to figure amongst the characters in Geppetto’s wall of cuckoo clocks? Isn’t the tacit homage to Back to the Future’s opening enough? – and you’re soon being expertly smooth-talked by Keegan-Michael Key’s wily fox Honest John, who would tempt Pinocchio from his righteous, if muddled, path.
His patter gets a worthy update, touching on contemporary anxieties around our heavily mediated identities. “Many people say that you’re not actually real until everybody knows about you,” he tells Pinocchio, massaging the naïf’s desire to become ‘real’ into a reason to pursue a life in the theatre.
Before you know it, you’re being spat out of the mouth of Monstro – here, not a whale as before but a creature with rather more tentacles – and onto the shore for a sentimental but tactfully tweaked finale, where the viewer is duly farewelled by Mr Cricket in his time-honoured capacity as narrator.
Zemeckis and Weitz’s most prominent intervention is also the weakest; the character of Fabiana (played by Kyanne Lamaya) – who is trapped, along with her ballerina puppet Sabina, in the employ of unscrupulous showman Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston) – doesn’t actually have any impact on the narrative. Her presence seems a rather inert attempt at box-ticking, most likely with a view to selling more merch to girls.
It’s to be expected that Pinocchio pander a little to its very young audience, and err on the side of conservatism in its messaging around the importance of family (albeit an unconventional family, made up of a man, a cat, a goldfish, and a puppet created in the image of the man’s deceased son).
And yet, the ways in which Zemeckis and Weitz have chosen to toy with the concept of being ‘real’ – here, being true to oneself as much as being truthful – make this Pinocchio more than just a flashy but soulless re-tread of the Disney original. And that’s no lie.
Pinocchio is streaming on Disney+.
