Here’s one hell of a way to remember just how strange “Pinocchio” (1940) was: watch Robert Zemeckis’ hallucinatory live-action remake of it, now playing on Disney+. Some of the kooky parts here are not from the script by Simon Farnaby and Chris Weitz—to their credit, they didn’t invent the hedonistic sugary kid-hell of Pleasure Island, or the concept of an innocent boy whose wooden appendage grows, or a lonely man’s fixation on having a manic pixie dream son (Italian author Carlo Collodi did). But Zemeckis and company do repeat all of those notes, and add more strangeness of their own, while giving us another lifeless live-action adaptation from the factory that’s inside the Disney vault.
Zemeckis’ “Pinocchio” is a smattering of confusing decisions and inappropriate gestures for family entertainment, with an uncanny nature that starts with the talking wooden doll: he’s a direct CGI adaptation of the animated version as if this were “Space Jam: A New Legacy.” This Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) has a fixed smile line on his mouth, drawn on by his master Gepetto, like a clown doll you wouldn’t want to be left in a dark room with. Figaro, the black and white shop kitty? Still adorable. Jiminy Cricket, voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, like he’s trying to win a Cliff Edwards impersonation contest? Fine. But Pinocchio? Even more unsettling.
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Then there’s the moment when this Pinocchio—before he goes off to school, which then becomes an adventure through the perils of showbiz, root beer temptation, and a sea monster’s belly—gets on his wooden hands and knees and smells a pile of shit. “I can’t wait to get to school and learn what all this stuff is!” he excitedly remarks. Do we really need to see that—like when Norman Bates is shown masturbating in Gus Van Sant’s remake of “Psycho”—to understand Pinocchio’s naïveté? It’s touches like that that make “Pinocchio” far more unhinged than it is emotionally grabbing, when its soul wants to be both, always with a permanent smile on its face.
In less glaring moments of Zemeckis still trying to get through some “Welcome to Marwen” irreverent doll humor out of his system, he treats the journey of Pinocchio as a set of thrill rides, so at least the pacing is commendable. There are numerous scenes of characters being zipped away, riding through something like the confectionary terrain of Sugar Mountain on Pleasure Island, or later when our heroes are racing to the end of the sea beast’s closing mouth. There are a couple of peppy original music numbers from Alan Silvestri and Glen Ballard, which prove to be the best place for Kyanne Lamaya’s endearing new character Fabiana to charm Pinocchio with her own marionette and dreams. (And for those Silvestri heads out there, his score is maybe sending some type of call for help by borrowing notes from his theme to “Mac and Me.”)
The big selling point for this live-action remake must be that it has Tom Hanks as woodcarver Gepetto, here with a bushy mustache and accent that booms every O in “Pinocchiooo!” as he celebrates and then searches for the wooden boy who goes missing on the way to school. But his sad muttering to himself doesn’t create the emotional tissue this version needs, especially when it adds an element of loss that’s different than the original’s Gepetto’s feeling of “It would be nice if he were a real boy.” You just feel so little for this version of Pinocchio or the human father who pines for him to return.
For all the talk about the uncanny valley that has followed Zemeckis’ films—with characters that aren’t believable enough to the human eye—“Pinocchio” does feel like it has passed that visual threshold. Sly entertainment fox Honest John (voiced on a sugar-high by Keegan-Michael Key) is a victorious example of this, with an electric energy, flowing fur, and clattering jaw. It’s hard to imagine a tall fox in a top hat looking any more realistic in a mostly live-action story.
But now it’s the storytelling that has reached an uncanniness here; this “Pinocchio” takes place in a world far stranger because of its high-def clarity, and it feels unnatural even for a fantasy. It makes the movie challenging to access in the lightest terms, and only little tidbits get out alive: Cynthia Erivo, as the new Blue Fairy, gives a rousing rendition of “When You Wish Upon a Star” as if it had been written for her. The practical sets are eye-popping, too, like the stages built for Pleasure Island, where kids smash clocks and record hateful videos while Luke Evans (as The Coachmaster) pops up to hand them root beer.
“Pinocchio,” released on Disney+ Day, is meant to be a wistful return to the moment in which “When You Wish Upon a Star” offered the melodic motif that now ushers in any Disney movie and became a company credo. Gepetto even has cuckoo clocks made of countless Disney and Pixar references, as if his humble workshop were the center of a universe. But instead of providing Disney peacefulness, it offers a bizarre moment of reflection: on both the questionable, ingrained Disney innocence of the past and what happens when these live-action movies repeat these elements with a cult-like sense of faithfulness and duty. This “Pinocchio” is real, and it’s real weird. [C-]