This is a preview of our pop culture newsletter The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, written by senior entertainment reporter Kevin Fallon. To receive the full newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up for it here.
Disney’s 1940 animated film Pinocchio is a movie in which a pile of wood comes to life, is tragically separated from his father figure, has his face painfully modified as punishment for innocently telling a lie, is conned into becoming a child actor, is kidnapped, meets a human trafficker that delights in turning boys into screaming donkeys that are then sold into forced labor, is swallowed by a whale, and is stalked by an insect throughout the entire ordeal. And this is meant to be for children.
Being traumatized for the rest of your life by a Disney cartoon is a rite of passage, for which the Mouse House has, with a morbid glee, provided its service for generations. Did watching a lion’s brother murder him while his son wailed in horror as he fell to the ground not scar—heh—you enough? Maybe watching Baby Quasimodo be tossed into a well will do it.
Can you read the words “The Fox and the Hound” without bursting into tears? Perhaps it’s time to revisit the scene in Bambi where the poor deer’s mother is shot and killed—a scene that upset my brother and me so intensely as kids that my aunt’s improvised recourse to comfort us was to tell us that “Bambi’s mom just went shopping.”
There is something to say about the importance of these moments in the formative films of our childhood, and the way they helped us develop the emotional intelligence to deal with grief, loss, and loneliness. The best of those movies found a beauty in that darkness, which is certainly what made Pinocchio so special. That magic dances around how deeply upsetting a movie that can be distilled to the above plot description can be.
Maintaining that balance is so necessary, and so signature, that it’s hard to imagine how a remake could possibly accomplish it. Yet as predictable as the failure of the new Disney+ remake already was, Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio is a disaster of such epic proportion that it borders on astounding.
I suppose, at one point, there was a thrill to watching Disney’s so-called “live-action” remakes of its classic cartoons. (A majority of them, this one included, are overwhelmingly made using CGI animation.) Nostalgia is like a sourdough starter: It needs to be fed to stay alive. Whether or not these movies were necessary was besides the point. They were exciting—a chance to revisit a story that you loved! Sometimes there was even some fun casting involved; we’d get to see a famous person embarrass themselves by trying to sing a Disney standard.
But most of the movies, from The Lion King to Beauty and the Beast, have ended up being uninspired, shot-for-shot, uncanny-valley remakes of the originals. (I’d argue that the more realistic approach taken by Mulan and Pete’s Dragon has fared the best.) The initial fun of returning to these films in a new way has been replaced by exhaustion and skepticism. This endeavor was never really about delighting the hearts of Disney-lovers, after all. It was about making a fast buck from a captive audience.
I truly believe you would have to be held captive to choose to watch this Pinocchio remake, let alone find much about it that’s redeeming.
Tom Hanks plays Geppetto, the recluse clockmaker who lost his wife and crafts a marionette to serve as a surrogate son to keep him company. Even though, again, this is a “live-action” take on the story, the Pinocchio that he creates is not a practical wooden doll, which would arguably be cool. This CGI Pinocchio also looks exactly like the original cartoon version. The surreal effect of this is that you can’t shake the notion that you’re watching Tom Hanks in a wig talking in an Italian accent to a Pinocchio doll he bought at the Disney Store in 1994.
(If there were any doubts about this movie doubling as a craven marketing ploy, Geppetto’s wall of cuckoo clocks are all fashioned after characters from other Disney films.)
The sight of this cartoon version of Pinocchio frolicking through a real world with actual humans is as bizarre as, well, if you looked outside right now and saw a cartoon version of Pinocchio frolicking through the real world with actual humans. There is an image from early in the film of Pinocchio curiously reaching out his hand to touch a pile of horse manure. It is seared into my brain forever.
Pinocchio isn’t the only character whose strange, photorealistic—but still glaringly fake—likeness doesn’t work. Jiminy Cricket here looks more like an actual cricket and less like a charming cartoon conscience, which… congrats to whoever thought a fun thing to do with the Pinocchio movie was to make the bug look more real. The fox that cons Pinocchio, the seagull that helps save him, and the donkey versions of the Pleasure Island boys are all CGI as well.
There are several large-scale production numbers that are performed by entirely animated marionettes, during which you can’t help but wonder what the point of this live-action farce is when you’re just watching some cartoons do a lil’ dance.
The technology used for these characters and sequences must be more sophisticated and advanced than most of us can imagine or comprehend. Good for everyone involved; it still looks fake. As I was watching an animated whale in a CGI ocean swallow Tom Hanks and a cartoon Pinocchio, I got a notification on my phone that the Queen had died. I haven’t quite unpacked yet what the metaphor is, but I know that there is one.
There are things that sort of work…I guess? Cynthia Erivo’s appearance as the Blue Fairy is an ethereal delight, complete with her rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star.” I don’t hate Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Jiminy Cricket voice performance. And, if I’m being honest, I thought that Tom Hanks in grandpa drag going full-throttle emotion while running around a soundstage talking to a CGI marionette was touching, in a kind-of mortifying way.
But, to borrow from the film’s script: When will these become “real, live, living” movies? The half-assed, animated/live action-hybrid thing is abysmal. In Pinocchio, our hero must prove that he is brave, truthful, and unselfish to get what he wants. Disney needs to prove that these remakes are not cynical, uninspired, and childhood-ruining if they want us to keep paying attention.
Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight: I wish I may, I wish I might, convince Disney to stop making these godforsaken live-action remakes that give me such a fright.
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