Little wooden dead
A review requested by Gavin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
The first question that I think would be at the forefront of anyone's mind upon a first viewing of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night would be "how could such a thing possibly have come into being in defiance of all that is true, beautiful, and humane in the world?" So it's a little disappointing that there's a very straightforward and frankly not very exciting answer to that question. In the mid-'80s, the television animation company Filmation had decided to branch out a bit into theatrical features, something it had last seriously dabbled in during the early 1970s. And this was, to its credit, a bold bit of ambition for that studio, which at the time was probably the worst American animation company the people who weren't "into" animation had, I think, a pretty good chance of having heard of. Which does, to be fair, mean that they were better than some of the ones that people hadn't heard of, like Sunbow or Ruby-Spears. But they were pretty bad. If you know them, it's probably because you were a child in the 1970s, and know them from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, or because you were a child in the 1980s, and know them from the ongoing toy commercials He-Man and She-Ra, or because you're "that kind" of Star Trek fan and know them from Star Trek: The Animated Series. And if you know any or all of those, you know that Filmation had the astonishing gift, even among TV animation concerns in the U.S. before Disney came in to fix the medium in 1987, of being able to reduce all of its properties to the same magnificently limited, inexpressive, inorganic form of movement where every character could be seen walking in rigid 90-degree profile with their arms and legs swinging in a perfect, deadeningly repetitive cycle, or in a three-quarters view from the chest up; if seen in the latter position, they might wear an expression of shock, furrowed-brow anger, or slightly drunken amusement, and at times their arm might pivot up from the bottom of the frame, from a position that appears to be several feet away from their torso. Sometimes, grown-ass adult fans of Filmation will strain to defend the studio's work on the grounds that, "oh, but they tried to use higher quality scripts!", and motherfucker, I don't care if they hired Gore Vidal and Truman Capote to adapt the collected works of Dorothy Parker, I'm not getting past that robotic, paper-thin, self-parodying art style.
So the first thing to acknowledge about Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is that, by Filmation standards, it looks extraordinarily great, by which I mean that I doubt it's the ugliest theatrically-released American animated feature of the 1980s.
Now, being very craven and cheap, Filmation's brain trust decided that a great strategy would be to produce unauthorised sequels to the feature films of the Walt Disney Company, and thereby (though I don't think this was officially part of the strategy) rely on the marketing push Disney put behind its re-releases of its classic features - this being the era of the "Disney Vault", when the re-release of decades-old Disney movies reliably became major theatrical events - in order to get some spillover attention for its own shabby offerings. What they forgot about, and it's a very silly thing to have forgotten about, is that Disney's lawyers are the most savage, merciless creatures in all of entertainment law, and while Filmation successfully argued in court that Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night was a sequel to the public-domain novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, the headache and effort of resisting Disney was part of the studio's death throes; the only other mock-Disney feature was the Snow White spin-off Happily Ever After, which premiered in the Philippines in 1989, and didn't come out in its native United States until 1993 (just in time for the last theatrical re-release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that same year), four years after Filmation had been shuttered and had its assets sold to the French cosmetics company L'Oréal.
That still doesn't explain why Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night turned out to be such a disorienting thing, a mixture of the unwatchably banal and the hypnotically demented that is indeed as fucked in the heart as something that would have a cartoon puppet-boy face off against something called the "Emperor of the Night" would have to be. One wonders what visions we lost when Filmation gave up the ghost: Bambi and the Warriors from Hell? One Hundred and One Damnations? Lady, the Tramp, and the Doom That Came to Sarnath? But this all kind of makes sense if we stop and remind ourselves where the studio was in the mid-'80s. This was their He-Man/She-Ra golden age, when their staff had gotten used to Manichean tales of good versus evil in which characters named, like, Nobelle Kindheart squared off against villains called things like Murr-Dar and Wickedor* who had literal skinless skulls for faces. I suspect that the story pitch, "Pinocchio (Scott Grimes), having become a Real Boy, finds himself happily puttering around the countryside until he is sucked into Hell where he must match wits with a Satanic four-armed death god (James Earl Jones) to win back the soul of Geppetto (Tom Bosley)" didn't really register as anything outside the norm of what you just did with kids' media. I mean, who wouldn't want to buy a four-armed Emperor of the Night action figure, makes perfect sense.
And that, in turn, maybe goes towards explaining what is truly, truly strangest to me about Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, which is that despite all of its elements that are individually deranged and visionary and feel like they were wrenched out of the pitch-black recesses of some underground animator's brain - and there are many of these - the thing as a whole feels like such yawning, uninspired hackwork. Perhaps that's also because I don't think you notice on a moment-by-moment basis how minutely screenwriters Robby London & Barry O'Brien & Dennis O'Flaherty have replicated the story structure of Disney's 1940 Pinocchio ("based on the public domain novel", well I'm glad you won the court case and all, but haha, oh my lord no, this is absolutely trying to infringe on Disney's copyright). Like, the moments all feel different. This film's bug sidekick whose name is a minced oath who serves as Pinocchio's conscience is a wooden carving that came to life, not a live cricket. A con artist raccoon whose name includes synonym for "bad guy" and a monkey, that's not like the con artist fox and cat, not really. The monkey talks! Or, some kind of fantasy space-disco, that's not like Pleasure Island. And in in this one, the evil puppeteer with a fake Italian name who imprisons Pinocchio and forces him to perform as a living puppet doesn't have an accent, and he also has a girl puppet honey trap, that was definitely missing from the Disney picture. And honestly, if there's one thing I could point to that really embodies the general madness of Pinocchio and the Emperor of Night, it wouldn't be the whole "Pinocchio goes to Hell and wagers his soul to ransom Geppetto's" thing, it would be that there's a cute girl puppet named Twinkle (Lana Beeson) that the villainous Puppetino (William Windom) uses to seduce Pinocchio, and a whole lot of what motivates Pinocchio for the remainder of the film is rescuing Twinkle so she can become a real girl just like he became a real boy, and thing is... Twinkle isn't sapient. It's not a living puppet. It's literally just a regular marionette, and there are even some moments where it slumps into a pile of sticks so we "get" that it's just a marionette. So basically, Pinocchio's entire arc in the whole film is that he's trying to ensoul a sex doll. The movie does not realise this. It views his actions throughout as romantic and noble.
The war in the heart of Pinocchio and So On is between the gleaming edge of madness represented by all of this, and how persistently not-mad this all acts. And I feel like I'm just barely scratching the surface of how much bizarre shit has been jammed in here. I mean, just breezed right on by "space disco" (or "Neon Cabaret" to give it the not-less-insane name it has in the movie) without even pausing for a comma, and if you had shown me either of the two musical numbers performed there as a teaser for the rest of the movie, I would have expected that like half of the review would be about the space disco. It's pretty fucking wild. It's full of glowing neon colors, but the children are all dressed as Victorian waifs. The songs are damnably catchy in their mindless jauntiness, feeling a bit like if Xanadu was done in the style of British musical hall songs: one a menacing "welcome to Hell the Neon Cabaret" ditty, the other a bouncy number about how Pinocchio could be a beloved star who would get all the ladies, represented by shimmering fields of cosmic stardust condensed into "sexy dancing lady" form. It's actually kind of impressive effects animation - in fact, the film has quite a lot of impressive effects animation, certainly more than I was even slightly anticipating from a Filmation production. I might even call them "very good" effects, certainly the element of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night that ends up being the most pleasurable to look at. Though it's not really an ugly film - the character designs aren't doing much of anything for me, full of weirdly straight lines that seem like they must have been unnecessarily fussy to animate and leave almost no room for the characters to express emotion, but that's the worst I would really want to say about this. It's certainly not lazy, at least, and that gets it far enough to be reasonably pain-free as a visual experience.
At the same time, it's not good, with the acknowledgement that there was probably never a time when the bar for "good enough for theatrical release" was lower than this decade, when Filmation was not the only TV outfit dipping their toes into features. I glossed over "no room to express emotion" like it wasn't a big deal, but of course it makes for a pretty rough time waiting for any cast member to be remotely appealing. A lot of weight has been given to the voice acting, which backfires: Scott Grimes is fine as a flavorless innocent, but the cast is mostly made out of "recognisable names we could get for cheap" like Bosley, Don Knotts (as Willickers the wooden firefly), Ed Asner (as the raccoon con man Sylvester J. Scalawag), and Jonathan Harris (as the militant bumblebee Lieutenant Grumblebee, who I kept waiting to actually intersect with the film's narrative), and there's not much in the way of "performance" here: Bosley and Knotts are playing their most famous sitcom characters, basically, and Harris is just huffing snootily. Asner is at least vaguely trying to inhabit a cartoon stock character, but that's about as exciting as it sounds. Jones and Jones alone is worth the time, and even then, that's is basically just because his sonorous voice makes literally everything sound cool and heavy, rather than because he's doing anything. So we get stiff-looking characters with big empty faces and flat, monotonous voices to match. Riveting animated cinema it ain't.
Which gets back to the bizarre tension underlying all of this: a three-way tug-of-war between bold, brave insanity that's exciting and fearless (Pinocchio fights the king of Hell!), bold, brave insanity that explodes on the launchpad and leaves one of the most thrillingly warped fiascoes of the era (Pinocchio is horny for a block of deadwood with a face painted on it), and just plain mediocrity. The origins of this, lest we forget, was nothing visionary or fucked-up or kinky; it was "if we make our own versions of Disney's public domain stories, we can ride in on their marketing budgets", and that is a vibe that Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night never lets your forget about. Certainly not while it's matching Disney's Pinocchio beat-for-beat across every minute of the first hour. I don't know what to do with any of this. I adore it, I hate it, it bored me. See it right this second, never see it if you value your soul, or whatever I don't care. I will say this, it has actually gotten me excited to catch up with Happily Ever After, God help me, just because I can't name anything else quite like this, and I'm hoping very much to see if there's at least one more where this came from.
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.
*Or, to take an actual, literal example from He-Man, "Evil-Lyn".
The first question that I think would be at the forefront of anyone's mind upon a first viewing of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night would be "how could such a thing possibly have come into being in defiance of all that is true, beautiful, and humane in the world?" So it's a little disappointing that there's a very straightforward and frankly not very exciting answer to that question. In the mid-'80s, the television animation company Filmation had decided to branch out a bit into theatrical features, something it had last seriously dabbled in during the early 1970s. And this was, to its credit, a bold bit of ambition for that studio, which at the time was probably the worst American animation company the people who weren't "into" animation had, I think, a pretty good chance of having heard of. Which does, to be fair, mean that they were better than some of the ones that people hadn't heard of, like Sunbow or Ruby-Spears. But they were pretty bad. If you know them, it's probably because you were a child in the 1970s, and know them from Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, or because you were a child in the 1980s, and know them from the ongoing toy commercials He-Man and She-Ra, or because you're "that kind" of Star Trek fan and know them from Star Trek: The Animated Series. And if you know any or all of those, you know that Filmation had the astonishing gift, even among TV animation concerns in the U.S. before Disney came in to fix the medium in 1987, of being able to reduce all of its properties to the same magnificently limited, inexpressive, inorganic form of movement where every character could be seen walking in rigid 90-degree profile with their arms and legs swinging in a perfect, deadeningly repetitive cycle, or in a three-quarters view from the chest up; if seen in the latter position, they might wear an expression of shock, furrowed-brow anger, or slightly drunken amusement, and at times their arm might pivot up from the bottom of the frame, from a position that appears to be several feet away from their torso. Sometimes, grown-ass adult fans of Filmation will strain to defend the studio's work on the grounds that, "oh, but they tried to use higher quality scripts!", and motherfucker, I don't care if they hired Gore Vidal and Truman Capote to adapt the collected works of Dorothy Parker, I'm not getting past that robotic, paper-thin, self-parodying art style.
So the first thing to acknowledge about Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night is that, by Filmation standards, it looks extraordinarily great, by which I mean that I doubt it's the ugliest theatrically-released American animated feature of the 1980s.
Now, being very craven and cheap, Filmation's brain trust decided that a great strategy would be to produce unauthorised sequels to the feature films of the Walt Disney Company, and thereby (though I don't think this was officially part of the strategy) rely on the marketing push Disney put behind its re-releases of its classic features - this being the era of the "Disney Vault", when the re-release of decades-old Disney movies reliably became major theatrical events - in order to get some spillover attention for its own shabby offerings. What they forgot about, and it's a very silly thing to have forgotten about, is that Disney's lawyers are the most savage, merciless creatures in all of entertainment law, and while Filmation successfully argued in court that Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night was a sequel to the public-domain novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, the headache and effort of resisting Disney was part of the studio's death throes; the only other mock-Disney feature was the Snow White spin-off Happily Ever After, which premiered in the Philippines in 1989, and didn't come out in its native United States until 1993 (just in time for the last theatrical re-release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs that same year), four years after Filmation had been shuttered and had its assets sold to the French cosmetics company L'Oréal.
That still doesn't explain why Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night turned out to be such a disorienting thing, a mixture of the unwatchably banal and the hypnotically demented that is indeed as fucked in the heart as something that would have a cartoon puppet-boy face off against something called the "Emperor of the Night" would have to be. One wonders what visions we lost when Filmation gave up the ghost: Bambi and the Warriors from Hell? One Hundred and One Damnations? Lady, the Tramp, and the Doom That Came to Sarnath? But this all kind of makes sense if we stop and remind ourselves where the studio was in the mid-'80s. This was their He-Man/She-Ra golden age, when their staff had gotten used to Manichean tales of good versus evil in which characters named, like, Nobelle Kindheart squared off against villains called things like Murr-Dar and Wickedor* who had literal skinless skulls for faces. I suspect that the story pitch, "Pinocchio (Scott Grimes), having become a Real Boy, finds himself happily puttering around the countryside until he is sucked into Hell where he must match wits with a Satanic four-armed death god (James Earl Jones) to win back the soul of Geppetto (Tom Bosley)" didn't really register as anything outside the norm of what you just did with kids' media. I mean, who wouldn't want to buy a four-armed Emperor of the Night action figure, makes perfect sense.
And that, in turn, maybe goes towards explaining what is truly, truly strangest to me about Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, which is that despite all of its elements that are individually deranged and visionary and feel like they were wrenched out of the pitch-black recesses of some underground animator's brain - and there are many of these - the thing as a whole feels like such yawning, uninspired hackwork. Perhaps that's also because I don't think you notice on a moment-by-moment basis how minutely screenwriters Robby London & Barry O'Brien & Dennis O'Flaherty have replicated the story structure of Disney's 1940 Pinocchio ("based on the public domain novel", well I'm glad you won the court case and all, but haha, oh my lord no, this is absolutely trying to infringe on Disney's copyright). Like, the moments all feel different. This film's bug sidekick whose name is a minced oath who serves as Pinocchio's conscience is a wooden carving that came to life, not a live cricket. A con artist raccoon whose name includes synonym for "bad guy" and a monkey, that's not like the con artist fox and cat, not really. The monkey talks! Or, some kind of fantasy space-disco, that's not like Pleasure Island. And in in this one, the evil puppeteer with a fake Italian name who imprisons Pinocchio and forces him to perform as a living puppet doesn't have an accent, and he also has a girl puppet honey trap, that was definitely missing from the Disney picture. And honestly, if there's one thing I could point to that really embodies the general madness of Pinocchio and the Emperor of Night, it wouldn't be the whole "Pinocchio goes to Hell and wagers his soul to ransom Geppetto's" thing, it would be that there's a cute girl puppet named Twinkle (Lana Beeson) that the villainous Puppetino (William Windom) uses to seduce Pinocchio, and a whole lot of what motivates Pinocchio for the remainder of the film is rescuing Twinkle so she can become a real girl just like he became a real boy, and thing is... Twinkle isn't sapient. It's not a living puppet. It's literally just a regular marionette, and there are even some moments where it slumps into a pile of sticks so we "get" that it's just a marionette. So basically, Pinocchio's entire arc in the whole film is that he's trying to ensoul a sex doll. The movie does not realise this. It views his actions throughout as romantic and noble.
The war in the heart of Pinocchio and So On is between the gleaming edge of madness represented by all of this, and how persistently not-mad this all acts. And I feel like I'm just barely scratching the surface of how much bizarre shit has been jammed in here. I mean, just breezed right on by "space disco" (or "Neon Cabaret" to give it the not-less-insane name it has in the movie) without even pausing for a comma, and if you had shown me either of the two musical numbers performed there as a teaser for the rest of the movie, I would have expected that like half of the review would be about the space disco. It's pretty fucking wild. It's full of glowing neon colors, but the children are all dressed as Victorian waifs. The songs are damnably catchy in their mindless jauntiness, feeling a bit like if Xanadu was done in the style of British musical hall songs: one a menacing "welcome to Hell the Neon Cabaret" ditty, the other a bouncy number about how Pinocchio could be a beloved star who would get all the ladies, represented by shimmering fields of cosmic stardust condensed into "sexy dancing lady" form. It's actually kind of impressive effects animation - in fact, the film has quite a lot of impressive effects animation, certainly more than I was even slightly anticipating from a Filmation production. I might even call them "very good" effects, certainly the element of Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night that ends up being the most pleasurable to look at. Though it's not really an ugly film - the character designs aren't doing much of anything for me, full of weirdly straight lines that seem like they must have been unnecessarily fussy to animate and leave almost no room for the characters to express emotion, but that's the worst I would really want to say about this. It's certainly not lazy, at least, and that gets it far enough to be reasonably pain-free as a visual experience.
At the same time, it's not good, with the acknowledgement that there was probably never a time when the bar for "good enough for theatrical release" was lower than this decade, when Filmation was not the only TV outfit dipping their toes into features. I glossed over "no room to express emotion" like it wasn't a big deal, but of course it makes for a pretty rough time waiting for any cast member to be remotely appealing. A lot of weight has been given to the voice acting, which backfires: Scott Grimes is fine as a flavorless innocent, but the cast is mostly made out of "recognisable names we could get for cheap" like Bosley, Don Knotts (as Willickers the wooden firefly), Ed Asner (as the raccoon con man Sylvester J. Scalawag), and Jonathan Harris (as the militant bumblebee Lieutenant Grumblebee, who I kept waiting to actually intersect with the film's narrative), and there's not much in the way of "performance" here: Bosley and Knotts are playing their most famous sitcom characters, basically, and Harris is just huffing snootily. Asner is at least vaguely trying to inhabit a cartoon stock character, but that's about as exciting as it sounds. Jones and Jones alone is worth the time, and even then, that's is basically just because his sonorous voice makes literally everything sound cool and heavy, rather than because he's doing anything. So we get stiff-looking characters with big empty faces and flat, monotonous voices to match. Riveting animated cinema it ain't.
Which gets back to the bizarre tension underlying all of this: a three-way tug-of-war between bold, brave insanity that's exciting and fearless (Pinocchio fights the king of Hell!), bold, brave insanity that explodes on the launchpad and leaves one of the most thrillingly warped fiascoes of the era (Pinocchio is horny for a block of deadwood with a face painted on it), and just plain mediocrity. The origins of this, lest we forget, was nothing visionary or fucked-up or kinky; it was "if we make our own versions of Disney's public domain stories, we can ride in on their marketing budgets", and that is a vibe that Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night never lets your forget about. Certainly not while it's matching Disney's Pinocchio beat-for-beat across every minute of the first hour. I don't know what to do with any of this. I adore it, I hate it, it bored me. See it right this second, never see it if you value your soul, or whatever I don't care. I will say this, it has actually gotten me excited to catch up with Happily Ever After, God help me, just because I can't name anything else quite like this, and I'm hoping very much to see if there's at least one more where this came from.
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.
*Or, to take an actual, literal example from He-Man, "Evil-Lyn".
