Pinocchio

Benjamin Evan Ainsworth plays Pinocchio in Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of the Disney classic.

Disney shouldn’t have cut the strings on this one

Lonely craftsman Geppetto (Tom Hanks) toils all day in a workshop filled with cuckoo clocks (all of which feature Disney Easter Eggs) he won’t sell. The clocks remind him of his late wife and son, who he mourns deeply. Geppetto is so consumed by his mourning, that he creates a marionette that resembles his late son.

He names the creation Pinocchio (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), because he’s made of pine wood, and wishes that the puppet could be real.

Wish granted.

The Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), hearing Geppetto’s wish — a wish that truly came from his heart — decides to give life to the puppet. When Geppetto wakes, he’s thrilled to find he has a family again.

But can he keep it?

As Pinocchio learns about the world, temptations draw him farther and farther afield.

Can Pinocchio learn to be a real boy? Can his cricket conscience Jiminy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) keep him on the right path? Will the memory of those lifeless CGI puppet eyes ever leave my nightmares?  

We’ve been here before with director Robert Zemeckis. We know he loves his CGI, and we know that brings odd, dead-eyed creations to the screen. Even Disney knows it, there’s a joke about having creepy Polar Express eyes in the new Chip ‘N’ Dale movie. But I held out hope that this film, a combination of live-action and animation, might bring back the best of Zemeckis’ impulses, giving us a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? instead of a disaster.

Evidently, that wish didn’t truly come from my heart, because the Blue Fairy ignored me.

There are a few basic problems with Pinocchio, starting with Zemeckis keeping the tone and styling of the 1940 Disney film but attempting to update the language and beats for a modern audience. The result is…odd. Tom Hanks seems to be stuck in some sort of bad accent loop (building off his exceedingly questionable work in Elvis) and leaps around his scenes looking more wooden than the puppet. When he starts singing “Pinocchio! Holy Smoke-io!” the cringe is so real it causes physical pain.

The entire movie is a long game of Bad Accent Bingo, with Hanks vying for the title against Gordon-Levitt, whose Jack McBrayer impression could use a little work, and Lewin Lloyd’s Lampwick, who’s stuck between a Nu-Yawk accent and a cockney brogue. There are also plenty of whacky Italian accents and English accents to make sure the setting is puzzling.

The only person in the film who seems committed to acting like a human is Kyanne Lamaya, who plays Fabina, a fellow captor of Stromboli’s traveling puppet show. The puppeteer reaches out to Pinocchio as a fellow lost soul, and her addition to the story is brief but heartfelt. It would have been interesting to see the relationship grow between the two outsiders, but Zemeckis is too busy marching the audience through the plot to bother with things like emotional development.

But for every interesting change Zemeckis makes, there’s a baffling one. For instance, in the original film Pleasure Island was a spot of hedonism. The children collected to visit there smoked, smashed houses, started fights, and ate gluttonously. But by 2022 standards, this would be unacceptable, so Zemeckis merely has the children on Pleasure Island drink root beer and smash up cuckoo clocks. It’s meant to avoid the ideas that children would smoke or fight, but it makes these little mallet-wielding hooligans look psychotic.

Worse, the Pleasure Island sequence misses the point of the original. It’s not that Pinocchio doesn’t want to be bad – he enjoys it at first – but he learns that the consequences of bad actions are terrible. In Zemeckis’ reworking, everything is based on peer pressure (with a terrible song to go along with the concept) and Pinocchio is miserable behaving badly, and only does it to appease his new friend.

There are also the changes made to Monstro, who now looks like rejected concept art from a Jurassic World movie. But the less said about that, the better.

Overall, the movie doesn’t seem to have a point of view. There are plenty of jokes aimed at adults, but all fall flat. The opening verbal sparring between narrator Jiminy and diegetic Jiminy sets the tone for a tedious slog very quickly. There’s some silly humor that works well, but the movie feels the need to explain itself so frequently (you will hear an explanation of Pinocchio’s name at least three times) that all plot development is quashed. Worst of all the movie just…ends. Whether Zemeckis ran out of CGI antics to film or just got bored with his own project, the movie simply stops and lets Jiminy’s narration take back over.

The real disappointment of Pinocchio is that Zemeckis is capable of great things. He made the definitive live-action/animation mashup: Who Framed Roger Rabbit? In that movie, every object had weight and the rules of the world were clearly defined. In Pinocchio, Tom Hanks fumbles around with a CGI cat that looks like it doesn’t belong in the same world as him. It’s a resounding letdown from a man capable of excellence.

Verdict: Unless you have kids clamoring to see it, or the need for flat puppet eyes to appear in your nightmares, skip it.

Pinnochio is rated PG and available to stream on Disney+.