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It’s time to admit that none of the live action remakes that Disney has done have been very good. Animation as a medium allows for greater expression than live action/CGI because when CGI is used in a realistic looking environment, it needs to have some fidelity to reality otherwise it will make the viewer uncomfortable. The original Pinocchio, and other films that have been remade like The Lion King, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella, are all taking something that is coming from an inherently unreal medium and trying to fit it into a paradigm it was not designed for, making the overall experience uncomfortable at best. Pinocchio
is also weighed down by the fact that it was very few people’s favorite “Golden Age” Disney movie.
At this point, viewers are probably familiar with the story of Pinocchio, considering the original movie is over 80 years old at this point, has been lampooned endlessly in pop culture, and has astoundingly appeared in multiple Kingdom Hearts games as the least fun levels in each entry. For those unfamiliar though, the story follows Geppetto (here played by Tom Hanks) who builds a puppet and wishes for it to come to life. After being kicked out of school, Pinocchio (here voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is abducted and brought to Pleasure Island, until his escape and reunion with Geppetto inside the mouth of Monstro.
The plot is just as ridiculous as last time, that said there are a few smart revisions that make the story a little clearer this time around. Geppetto does have a backstory that explains why he wants a puppet of a little boy to come to life, which does alleviate some of the more problematic and/or strange aspects of the original since it is never really explained why he wants this scenario. The narrative does a better job of tying how Geppetto gets into the mouth of Monstro (even if Monstro is now a sea monster and not a whale) while also tying it directly to the plot of the movie so it seems less like plot convenience.
That said, it is a live action remake so there are times where the visuals are not the best because they are attempting to take the visual elements that work in 2D cartoon animation and convert them into a 3D photorealistic space causing things to seem off. When that happens, the filmmakers and digital effects artists are forced to make things look more like real life, causing weird visual cues.
At this point, the audience knows the three reasons that these live action remakes exist: extend the copyright on the story and characters, make easy money since the audience knows the characters and story therefore saving on advertising, and introduce these characters and stories to international audiences that may not have seen them during their initial runs or have them as cultural touchstones for almost a century due to cultural embargos for use in the parks. It’s transparent and audiences are not responding to them in the ways that they used to, but these will continue on until people stop watching them as evidenced by Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Mufasa (an origin movie about Mufasa from The Lion King because who hasn’t wondered how he became king), and Peter Pan and Wendy being shown off at the D23 Expo, currently ongoing. That said Pinocchio is not worth the time to view and, if a viewer wants to experience the movie, they’re better off scrolling a little further on Disney+ to just watch the original. The changes this movie makes are not enough to warrant a view instead of the original, plus the viewer will not be subjected to a literal thirty-second-long scene of Pinocchio in awe over a pile of animal waste in the street, which is a perfect metaphor for this film.
Final Rating: 4/10
