Give a bad boy enough rope, and he'll soon make a jackass of himself
The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon - even just another cartoon created by Walt Disney Productions at the absolute pinnacle of its artistic abilities within the medium that it perfected to a degree unmatched by any other studio working in that medium. Other films based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 novel Le avventure di Pinocchio (and there have been so very many) are more faithful to both the letter and the spirit of the text, but none that I know of has been such a sublime work of visual art.
Given the unbecoming, hungry urgency with which the current incarnation of the Walt Disney Company has been exhuming and defiling the corpses of so many of its past successes, the existence of a live-action & photorealistic CGI remake of Pinocchio was probably an inevitability, and we now live in a world where that inevitability has become present reality. The question was never, does the new Pinocchio meet the standards of the 1940 film, which I think would be a literal impossibility given the lack of any living animators as good at their job as the people working at Disney in the late 1930s. The question wasn't even really, is the new Pinocchio at least good on its own merits, since these live-action desecrations have a singularly low success rate (I would be inclined to say that only one is unambiguously good, the 2016 Pete's Dragon), and they've been generally getting worse. The question was only ever, so just how bad are we talking, and I now have the answer to that question: very.
There's a moment that I think feels telling of the whole cursed misadventure. Early in his career as a sapient life form, the living marionette Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, and played by an uncanny CGI animated figured modeled precisely on the 1940 character design) is off to school - this of course happens in the '40 film, and the '83 novel, and overall it seems hard to imagine any remotely faithful adaptation of the book that doesn't include at least this bit - and is proceeding in his merry naïveté, when he drops the apple he's carrying for his teacher. And the apple rolls a bit and lands just inches away from a pile of horse shit - "road apples" in the vulgar parlance of our time, so it's something of a pun. And this does not happen in the '40 film, though I will not be so reckless as to claim that it has never occurred in any other adaptation to date.
So that's part of what's telling: at long last, 141 years after Collodi first began to serialise his novel, our liberated culture has finally been freed of the shackles of reactionary propriety, and we have at long last been given to witness the unattainable dream of a Pinocchio movie with a close-up shot of horse droppings. But it's only part, and the other part is that Pinocchio finds this pile of warm dung terribly interesting. He approaches it warily but with wide-eyed curiosity, like a cat that has just spotted a spider on the wall. As he reaches for the apple, he takes a big interrogative whiff, and immediately pulls back, repulsed. But than just a bit later, we see this again in a wide shot from the side, and he's still poking at it. He knows it's shit, he knows it reeks like shit, and he's still prodding at the shit to see if there's anything else interesting about it. And really, if that's not the most perfect metaphor for dumb assholes like me who keep trudging up to every one of these Disney live-action remakes, just because of morbid curiosity, well I don't know what.
Anyways, there are some additions above and beyond the pile of horse shit, but for the most part, Pinocchio '22 is just a banal re-run of Pinocchio '40, right down to replicating several of its jokes. It does not replicate all of them well - it does not replicate any of them well, I should say, but some of them are just horrible. Like, in the original film, Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) leans on a wood carving of a woman, and is mortified to realise he was grabbing her en-bustled ass. In the original film, this is a quick visual gag, over and done in one simple set-up of less than eight seconds. In the remake, this is a big elaborate delayed thing, in which the camera tracks backwards to reveal the carving, then a cut to Jiminy's POV of the woman's severe face from an ominously low angle, then a cut back to him nervously apologising. It's horribly drawn-out and labored and not even a tiny bit funny, because the whole point of this kind of tossed-off gag is that it's just meant to be a quick little jab, not, like, a thing.
Going down the whole list of all the ways in which this film is a tedious, stilted re-enactment of the original would get incredibly depressing quickly, and it's not really necessary. Pinocchio has plenty that's awful entirely in and of itself, and vanishingly little that's good. Most of what is worst about it is its generally shininess, sterile and denuded of any real vitality or imaginative fantasy. The film has been directed by Robert Zemeckis, who is fully in his "what if I replaced actors with nightmarish CGI pod people whose expressions are hollow and zombie-like" mode, and who has most certainly never made a worse film than this; it feels very much like his ungainly and slightly horrifying Welcome to Marwen from 2018, but where that film's chilling descent into the Uncanny Valley at least felt like it could be explained away as having something, anything at all, to do with its protagonist's dysfunctional, fragmentary brain, Pinocchio is quite confident that the titular puppet and all the fantastic beings he interacts with are charming. This is amply misplaced confidence: Pinocchio himself isn't the worst thing, though he suffers from being directly comparable to the remarkable character animation used on the same shapes in 1940.
But almost everything else is somewhere on the spectrum between "hideous" and "the Lovecraftian terrors witnessed by the sensitive-souled in the depths of an opium nightmare". The worst of it are the film's two cats: Figaro, who in 1940 was the single best animated kitten in the history of the medium, a combination of mischievously inquisitive feline and petulant toddler, and is now a gross little mutant being whose eyes are much too expressive for his photorealistic fur; and Gideon, the mute sidekick of the fox conman Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key, who is unique among all the cast members in having some idea of what the fuck he's doing). The fox is pretty goddamn bad, to be fair, with its heavily realistic face jarring unpleasantly with its anthropomorphic body, but at least the CGI holds up. Gideon looks like a melted chocolate bar was rolled in cat hair and then scanned into a PS3 game. And while the cats aren't such large figures that they immediately kill the movie (both have seen their parts much reduced from the 1940 film, in fact), Jiminy Cricket is almost as bad as they are, and he looks like hell, a disastrous attempt to pull back in some slightly insectoid touches while leaving the round little human design of the original character in place. And Jiminy is made even worse since Gordon-Levitt, through terrible direction or his own hideously misguided nostalgia, has elected to do his best attempt at a straight impression of Cliff Edwards; I think there might be some digital manipulation involved to sweeten the effect, but I can't be sure. Regardless, the character's voice thin and painfully high pitched, with a dismal echo of Edwards's Missouri accent occasionally lurching to the foreground. It's shrill and irritatingly peppy, and this accentuates the unearthly bright colors and weird textures of the animated character; he is horrible, simply horrible, and if ever a version of the Cricket in a film deserved to be smashed into a damp smudge by a puppet with a hammer, it would surely be this one.
Zemeckis is, this is all to say, fully in "garish hacky asshole" mode, and every last bit of Pinocchio is larded up with busy virtual camera movement, random CGI ornamentation, wretchedly broad acting. It's impressive how bad the whole cast is, and how none of them are bad in the same way. Tom Hanks, reuniting with Zemeckis for the first time since the director's first dive into the hellish abyss of bad CGI, 2004's The Polar Express, is a mumbling, inarticulate Geppetto, trotting out some indecipherable accent that feels like it started with Christian Rub's performance in the 1940 film and from there went in the direction of something vaguely "Italian"; he does not at all benefit from Zemeckis's bizarre choices about blocking and where to set the camera, which always makes Geppetto feel indistinct, remote, and not at all fatherly. Then again, since the script, by Zemeckis & Chris Weitz, has a persistently dubious relationship to the idea of fathers (variations on "this is what your father would want" come up just often enough for it to clearly be a critique), maybe we're actually meant to hate Geppetto. Mission accomplished, if that was the goal. Luke Evans is a broad stagey catastrophe as the villainous Coachmen, dying a vicious and lingering death as he grunts through the worst of the three bad songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard that have been tacked onto the poor new renditions of the originals (of which only three remain). Cynthia Erivo does her best with a terribly-conceived version of the Blue Fairy as a kind of incurious idiot using her magic arbitrarily and thoughtlessly, and in a film where every real-world element seems to be floating in front of a green screen, it's especially obvious that she was interacting with absolutely nothing, including her own diaphanous "costume"
The plot has been retooled only slightly, and always to degraded effect: Geppetto has a dead wife and child now, and has, morbidly, constructed Pinocchio as a replacement for the latter; this doesn't seem to inform anything after the first sequence, which is absolutely for the best, though it would have been better if it didn't inform anything at all. A new kind human character has been added, the puppeteer Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya), but since there was no space in the original story (Disney's or Collodi's) for a figure like her, she always feels to exist in a pocket universe. Everything across the entire film that could create the slightest burr of an edge has been sanded to oblivion: they drink fucking root beer on Pleasure Island now, and the donkey transformation scene has been carefully managed to lose all of its primordial horror. And this awful tendency towards making it safer and more kid-friendly, reducing the weird nastiness of the original to soothing therapeutic pablum reaches its appalling nadir in the ending. This has been tweaked in ways that would be sufficient, even if the first 95 minutes of the film was working, to make the whole thing a complete disaster; it is difficult to imagine more completely missing the most fundamental points of Pinocchio in all its many incarnations than the utterly rancid final scene of Zemeckis and Weitz's script manages to do.
There is not one single instant in the entire film, narrative or visual or musical, character beat or gag, that isn't effortlessly outclassed by its analogue in the 1940 film; there might not be one single instant that isn't ugly and joyless and terrible purely on its own merits. Key's performance as Honest John is the closest I came to enjoying any element of this film on any level, and even he gets stuck with the two most powerfully obscene jokes in the script, first suggesting that Pinocchio will become an "influencer", and the suggestion that he should change his ungainly name to the easier-to-spell "Chris Pine". Nothing works here, not one line, not one visual effect, not one image. I like that it is brightly-colored, unlike most of the brown swill that gets extruded from Disney these days. But if I want to watch a brightly-colored version of Pinocchio produced by Disney, well, I'm pretty fucking well covered already.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Given the unbecoming, hungry urgency with which the current incarnation of the Walt Disney Company has been exhuming and defiling the corpses of so many of its past successes, the existence of a live-action & photorealistic CGI remake of Pinocchio was probably an inevitability, and we now live in a world where that inevitability has become present reality. The question was never, does the new Pinocchio meet the standards of the 1940 film, which I think would be a literal impossibility given the lack of any living animators as good at their job as the people working at Disney in the late 1930s. The question wasn't even really, is the new Pinocchio at least good on its own merits, since these live-action desecrations have a singularly low success rate (I would be inclined to say that only one is unambiguously good, the 2016 Pete's Dragon), and they've been generally getting worse. The question was only ever, so just how bad are we talking, and I now have the answer to that question: very.
There's a moment that I think feels telling of the whole cursed misadventure. Early in his career as a sapient life form, the living marionette Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, and played by an uncanny CGI animated figured modeled precisely on the 1940 character design) is off to school - this of course happens in the '40 film, and the '83 novel, and overall it seems hard to imagine any remotely faithful adaptation of the book that doesn't include at least this bit - and is proceeding in his merry naïveté, when he drops the apple he's carrying for his teacher. And the apple rolls a bit and lands just inches away from a pile of horse shit - "road apples" in the vulgar parlance of our time, so it's something of a pun. And this does not happen in the '40 film, though I will not be so reckless as to claim that it has never occurred in any other adaptation to date.
So that's part of what's telling: at long last, 141 years after Collodi first began to serialise his novel, our liberated culture has finally been freed of the shackles of reactionary propriety, and we have at long last been given to witness the unattainable dream of a Pinocchio movie with a close-up shot of horse droppings. But it's only part, and the other part is that Pinocchio finds this pile of warm dung terribly interesting. He approaches it warily but with wide-eyed curiosity, like a cat that has just spotted a spider on the wall. As he reaches for the apple, he takes a big interrogative whiff, and immediately pulls back, repulsed. But than just a bit later, we see this again in a wide shot from the side, and he's still poking at it. He knows it's shit, he knows it reeks like shit, and he's still prodding at the shit to see if there's anything else interesting about it. And really, if that's not the most perfect metaphor for dumb assholes like me who keep trudging up to every one of these Disney live-action remakes, just because of morbid curiosity, well I don't know what.
Anyways, there are some additions above and beyond the pile of horse shit, but for the most part, Pinocchio '22 is just a banal re-run of Pinocchio '40, right down to replicating several of its jokes. It does not replicate all of them well - it does not replicate any of them well, I should say, but some of them are just horrible. Like, in the original film, Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) leans on a wood carving of a woman, and is mortified to realise he was grabbing her en-bustled ass. In the original film, this is a quick visual gag, over and done in one simple set-up of less than eight seconds. In the remake, this is a big elaborate delayed thing, in which the camera tracks backwards to reveal the carving, then a cut to Jiminy's POV of the woman's severe face from an ominously low angle, then a cut back to him nervously apologising. It's horribly drawn-out and labored and not even a tiny bit funny, because the whole point of this kind of tossed-off gag is that it's just meant to be a quick little jab, not, like, a thing.
Going down the whole list of all the ways in which this film is a tedious, stilted re-enactment of the original would get incredibly depressing quickly, and it's not really necessary. Pinocchio has plenty that's awful entirely in and of itself, and vanishingly little that's good. Most of what is worst about it is its generally shininess, sterile and denuded of any real vitality or imaginative fantasy. The film has been directed by Robert Zemeckis, who is fully in his "what if I replaced actors with nightmarish CGI pod people whose expressions are hollow and zombie-like" mode, and who has most certainly never made a worse film than this; it feels very much like his ungainly and slightly horrifying Welcome to Marwen from 2018, but where that film's chilling descent into the Uncanny Valley at least felt like it could be explained away as having something, anything at all, to do with its protagonist's dysfunctional, fragmentary brain, Pinocchio is quite confident that the titular puppet and all the fantastic beings he interacts with are charming. This is amply misplaced confidence: Pinocchio himself isn't the worst thing, though he suffers from being directly comparable to the remarkable character animation used on the same shapes in 1940.
But almost everything else is somewhere on the spectrum between "hideous" and "the Lovecraftian terrors witnessed by the sensitive-souled in the depths of an opium nightmare". The worst of it are the film's two cats: Figaro, who in 1940 was the single best animated kitten in the history of the medium, a combination of mischievously inquisitive feline and petulant toddler, and is now a gross little mutant being whose eyes are much too expressive for his photorealistic fur; and Gideon, the mute sidekick of the fox conman Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key, who is unique among all the cast members in having some idea of what the fuck he's doing). The fox is pretty goddamn bad, to be fair, with its heavily realistic face jarring unpleasantly with its anthropomorphic body, but at least the CGI holds up. Gideon looks like a melted chocolate bar was rolled in cat hair and then scanned into a PS3 game. And while the cats aren't such large figures that they immediately kill the movie (both have seen their parts much reduced from the 1940 film, in fact), Jiminy Cricket is almost as bad as they are, and he looks like hell, a disastrous attempt to pull back in some slightly insectoid touches while leaving the round little human design of the original character in place. And Jiminy is made even worse since Gordon-Levitt, through terrible direction or his own hideously misguided nostalgia, has elected to do his best attempt at a straight impression of Cliff Edwards; I think there might be some digital manipulation involved to sweeten the effect, but I can't be sure. Regardless, the character's voice thin and painfully high pitched, with a dismal echo of Edwards's Missouri accent occasionally lurching to the foreground. It's shrill and irritatingly peppy, and this accentuates the unearthly bright colors and weird textures of the animated character; he is horrible, simply horrible, and if ever a version of the Cricket in a film deserved to be smashed into a damp smudge by a puppet with a hammer, it would surely be this one.
Zemeckis is, this is all to say, fully in "garish hacky asshole" mode, and every last bit of Pinocchio is larded up with busy virtual camera movement, random CGI ornamentation, wretchedly broad acting. It's impressive how bad the whole cast is, and how none of them are bad in the same way. Tom Hanks, reuniting with Zemeckis for the first time since the director's first dive into the hellish abyss of bad CGI, 2004's The Polar Express, is a mumbling, inarticulate Geppetto, trotting out some indecipherable accent that feels like it started with Christian Rub's performance in the 1940 film and from there went in the direction of something vaguely "Italian"; he does not at all benefit from Zemeckis's bizarre choices about blocking and where to set the camera, which always makes Geppetto feel indistinct, remote, and not at all fatherly. Then again, since the script, by Zemeckis & Chris Weitz, has a persistently dubious relationship to the idea of fathers (variations on "this is what your father would want" come up just often enough for it to clearly be a critique), maybe we're actually meant to hate Geppetto. Mission accomplished, if that was the goal. Luke Evans is a broad stagey catastrophe as the villainous Coachmen, dying a vicious and lingering death as he grunts through the worst of the three bad songs by Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard that have been tacked onto the poor new renditions of the originals (of which only three remain). Cynthia Erivo does her best with a terribly-conceived version of the Blue Fairy as a kind of incurious idiot using her magic arbitrarily and thoughtlessly, and in a film where every real-world element seems to be floating in front of a green screen, it's especially obvious that she was interacting with absolutely nothing, including her own diaphanous "costume"
The plot has been retooled only slightly, and always to degraded effect: Geppetto has a dead wife and child now, and has, morbidly, constructed Pinocchio as a replacement for the latter; this doesn't seem to inform anything after the first sequence, which is absolutely for the best, though it would have been better if it didn't inform anything at all. A new kind human character has been added, the puppeteer Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya), but since there was no space in the original story (Disney's or Collodi's) for a figure like her, she always feels to exist in a pocket universe. Everything across the entire film that could create the slightest burr of an edge has been sanded to oblivion: they drink fucking root beer on Pleasure Island now, and the donkey transformation scene has been carefully managed to lose all of its primordial horror. And this awful tendency towards making it safer and more kid-friendly, reducing the weird nastiness of the original to soothing therapeutic pablum reaches its appalling nadir in the ending. This has been tweaked in ways that would be sufficient, even if the first 95 minutes of the film was working, to make the whole thing a complete disaster; it is difficult to imagine more completely missing the most fundamental points of Pinocchio in all its many incarnations than the utterly rancid final scene of Zemeckis and Weitz's script manages to do.
There is not one single instant in the entire film, narrative or visual or musical, character beat or gag, that isn't effortlessly outclassed by its analogue in the 1940 film; there might not be one single instant that isn't ugly and joyless and terrible purely on its own merits. Key's performance as Honest John is the closest I came to enjoying any element of this film on any level, and even he gets stuck with the two most powerfully obscene jokes in the script, first suggesting that Pinocchio will become an "influencer", and the suggestion that he should change his ungainly name to the easier-to-spell "Chris Pine". Nothing works here, not one line, not one visual effect, not one image. I like that it is brightly-colored, unlike most of the brown swill that gets extruded from Disney these days. But if I want to watch a brightly-colored version of Pinocchio produced by Disney, well, I'm pretty fucking well covered already.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
