This live action and animated reimagining of the classic fairy tale takes too much time relaying its narrative.
Surprising that Disney hired two previous directors before handing the strings of its partially-animated “Pinocchio” to Robert Zemeckis, Hollywood’s Geppetto, the creator on a quest to transform pixels into real boys (and girls and Grendels). Under Zemeckis’s attentive eye, Pinocchio’s yellow cap appears made of felt and his white gloves, affectionately hand-knit. When the marionette spirals his head like a pinewood Linda Blair, his joints make a satisfying creak. But boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.
The reimagining goes awry in the opening number — not “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the Oscar-winner that ascended to become the company’s signature tune, but a new ballad, “When He Was Here With Me,” sung by Geppetto (Tom Hanks) about his freshly concocted dead son. Someone wished to burden the old whittler with more motivation, and tacked on a dead wife to boot.
This interminable shop sequence is paced so slowly that when a window closes, the image loiters until its latch drops into place. So slowly that when the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) freezes a screeching cuckoo clock, it feels like a cruel prank. So slowly that we forget that Hanks is ranked high among the most charming screen performers of all time as he opens his mouth to sing a second unwelcome new song in which he rhymes “Pinocchio” with “Holy Smoke-i-o.” And when Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finally head outside for fresh air, things do not improve.
The key problem is the film’s fear of the original author Carlo Collodi’s theme: that children are raw material inclined to sloth, foolishness and self-serving fibs. (Collodi’s puppet kills the cricket and is haunted by its ghost.) Walt Disney’s 1940 cartoon softened the tyke’s sins to rambunctious naïveté. Now, he’s been flattened out of having a personality at all. His lumpen goodness turns the hot-tempered fairy tale into a dull after-school special about peer pressure, which seems to suggest that Geppetto should have just carved himself a helicopter to parent the boy.
In place of temptation, the film serves up bizarre plot-fillers. Pinocchio learns about taxes and horse dung, meets a love interest (Kyanne Lamaya) and stares blankly at zingers directed toward the modern enticements of social media. (Pleasure Island now includes Contempt Corner where kids wave placards haranguing each other to shut up.) Joy can be found only in Luke Evans’s scary-fun Coachman (now saddled with unnecessary smoke monster minions) and a line where Jiminy seems to comment on the last decades of Zemeckis’s career: “Sure, there are other ways to make a boy — but I don’t think Geppetto gets out much, and I guess it’s just the best he could do with the tools he’s got.”
Pinocchio
Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Disney+.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
