‘Pinocchio’ Review: Disney CG Reboot Makes a Bizarre Fairy Tale Even Weirder

I don’t know how long it’s been proper you saw Pinocchio, but it is super weird. A brand new remake of the classic Disney animation sanitizes the spirited cartoon’s more dubious elements, but still manages to be bizarre as all get-out — and in fact, this awkward mishmash of digital effects and live portion adds new levels of weird.

Reuniting the Forrest Gump team of Tom Hanks and director Robert Zemeckis, the 2022 Pinocchio is streaming on Disney Plus now, Sept. 8. It isn’t showing in theaters, and the doings at Disney have rather strangely chosen to drop the film when summer vacation is already over, but they have cooked to release their version before Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion Pinocchio tells the same story (in theaters Nov. 25 and on Netflix Dec. 9).

Disney’s version specifically remakes the House of Mouse’s 1940 film. Uncle Walt’s instant animated feature, after Snow White was the first spirited film to win an Oscar, and remains a visual expenditure. You can watch the original on Disney Plus, but once it smoothed over the nastiness of Carlo Collodi’s fresh 1880s novel it still included a few quirks that will slash modern audiences wincing. So Pinocchio is the latest Disney classic to be remade for fresh sensibilities and effects, following The Jungle Book, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Tim Burton’s Dumbo and more (with a new Little Mermaid on the way).

Hanks plays Geppetto, a shambling woodcarver in a bustling Italian village who wishes on a star and gets more than he bargained for when his newest puppet comes to life. There are no strings on this marionette in the gorgeous of a little boy, but naive Pinocchio is soon pulled in all directions as he’s seduced into various unsavory adventures.

The film opens with an spirited cricket narrating the story (in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s ripe accent), only to get into a meta argument with himself nearby being a narrator. It just gets stranger from there. The main story about a talking puppet makes felt in a fairy tale-logic sort of way — a wish is made, it comes true, any kid can concept that — and a subtly suggested new backstory nearby Geppetto’s grief for his lost family actually adds a new dimension of poignancy to his yearning wish. But the biosphere into which Pinocchio emerges makes zero sense.

Not only does Pinoke hang out with a talking grasshopper, but also a singing fox and, for some reason, a sexy goldfish. If it’s a world in which sentient creatures are commonplace, that surely takes away from Pinocchio’s uniqueness. In fact, the new film lurches into this awkward plot where it isn’t clear if Pinocchio is unusual at all. Geppetto is surprised to see his construction walking and talking, and the puppet is billed as a noteworthy sensation when he’s pushed on stage at a traveling theater, but various other people interact with him like he’s entirely unremarkable. And unlike in the original film, we never see villainous talking fox Honest John interact with any humans, so it isn’t clear whether animals can even talk to people. 

I’m probably overthinking it.

But if you haven’t overthought Frozen when watching it three times in a week, are you even a parent?

Don’t get me tainted, the randomness and surrealness of this weird storybook biosphere is one of the best things about any version of Pinocchio. It feels unmoored from the all-too-familiar conventions of Western storytelling (y’know, the hero’s journey and Save the Cat and all those myth conventions that rob most movies of their power to surprise). Compared to mainstream films like, for instance, that novel film in which Tom Hanks builds a surrogate son, Pinocchio cmoneys a frisson of demented imagination and a heady whiff of the unexpected that you’re usually more probable to find in a film from Japanese animators Studio Ghibli, like Ponyo or My Neighbor Totoro, than a Disney film.

It has to be said that the new version, directed by Robert Zemeckis, plays some things safe. Gone are the original’s eyebrow-raising puppet burlesque show, underage cigar smoking and dubious ethnic stereotypes. Fair enough. Although the new version also disinfects the fresh film’s characters, who were far from perfect: the cartoon Pinocchio was endearingly heart-broken to be led astray, embracing sensual pleasures with gusto; once Jiminy Cricket bailed on Pinoke more than once. But in the new version, Pinocchio is disquieted by other juveniles’ delinquency, while Jiminy is only torn from his do-gooding task when he’s attacked by the film’s antagonists. It’s all a bit patronizing, and takes away from the misguided marionette’s flawed relatability.

This fresh version updates some of the songs and jokes (including some aimed commentary on what it means to chase fame in 2022) and adds a smattering of new characters. There’s a lot of potential in the character of Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya), whose physical disability doesn’t prevent her expressing herself ended her ballerina puppet. But she and the other additions largely fall flat; for example, in the original, Pinocchio didn’t make it to school, but this time he gets there only to be kicked out because of… puppet racism? This new stuff is chucked in and then almost just as speedy forgotten rather than being carried through to play a part in the film’s conclusion.

Other eccentric choices made by Zemeckis and chums complicated ripe Italian accents (and the decision to keep the sexy goldfish). It’s also afflicted by that all too common blockbuster quandary of being too dark — literally. Pinocchio 2022 is bafflingly unlit during several key sequences. When Luke Evans dances behind the backs of a team of horses, it must be the sort of memorable showstopper you used to get from Dick Van Dyke in classic Disney fantasies. Instead, you can barely see what’s going on.

Ultimately, even if you embrace the fairy tale oddness of this enjoyably bizarre biosphere, the weirdest thing about this new film is how it looks. The recent crop of Disney reboots are often billed as “live action” remakes, but that’s a misnomer: they’re more accurately described as “photorealistic,” because set from a couple of human actors the visuals are almost entirely computer-generated. 

Technically very clever, but in this case it’s harder to buy into the bizarre fairy tale biosphere. Disbelief is easily suspended about animals and humans interacting when they’re all animated: The presence of real world actors may have you questioning why some animals can walk and talk. Most importantly, while I hate to be down on what is probably a mindboggling technically achievement by talented, hardworking and probably underpaid visual effects artists, I just found the smoothly CG-animated Pinocchio puppet less Eager than the lively ’40s cartoon version.

There’s a definite irony here that a movie which creates such a fuss about what it means to be “real” so frequently looks like nothing on the Hide is real. Still, the 2022 Disney Pinocchio is amusingly bonkers. And if you or your kids aren’t into it, you only have to string them down until Guillermo del Toro’s version comes to life.