Note: This film is only available to watch on the Disney+ streaming service.
Michael's Movie Grade: D
A bland remake of one of Disney's best films.
Even as a huge Disney fan, it is hard for me to even care about these remakes the studio keeps turning out these days. Pinocchio is not the worst of these remakes, but it still is not a good movie. Like all of these Disney remakes the worst parts of this film are the ones that directly follow the movie it is remaking. Some scenes are incredibly faithful and shot for shot copy the 1940 movie. There are two major problems with that. One is that the 1940 movie still exists and the other is that that movie was a cartoon. To do the same thing in live action or more realistic-looking animation (since many of the scenes feature a lot of CGI), just doesn't work the same. The I Have No Strings on Me musical number and the slapstick involving Honest John in Gideon simply pale in comparison to the 1940 movie because they don't work as well in this completely different style of filmmaking. This movie does change quite a bit though. Unfortunately none of these changes are that interesting. We get some new characters, but don't get to spend enough time with them for them to become interesting. The new songs simply are not very good and I can't see one of them sticking in your head after watching the film. Pleasure Island was changed quite a bit, but in a way that takes out all the creepiness and suspense of the 1940 film and replaces it with blandness. The more realistic designs of some of the characters such as Jimminy Cricket lack the charm or memorable-ness of the original designs. The humor here also doesn't work that well and there is a comedic scene that involves Pinocchio looking at a piece of poop. He smells it and wonders what it is and that is the whole joke. How that is supposed to be funny confuses me. This movie also completely wastes a great actor like Tom Hanks, but not giving him any opportunity to shine or do anything interesting.
I will say though that the film is competently made (well Robert Zemeckis is a great director) and some of the visuals look great. There is also such a charm to the film it is remaking that it can still retain a little of it.
The 1940 Pinocchio is a masterpiece and one of my favorite Disney films. It will live in the hearts of movie fans forever. This is a film that I will probably forget exists in a few months.
Interesting how Tom Hanks made a big show of saying how him playing gay wouldn't be acceptable today (not that he plans to give back the Oscar he won for doing so 30 years ago, and playing gay doesn't seem to be holding back Brendan Fraser's comeback), and here he plays an old Italian man. I wonder if 30 years from now he'll say that would no longer be acceptable.
ReplyDeleteAlso, for all the supposed improvements to the original to make it more acceptable to contemporary audiences (not that it seems to be working), I don't think they dealt with the most perplexing story point of the original: none of the villains gets punished. Walt seemed to be making the point that there's nothing worse than a disobedient boy, but Pinocchio is not willfully disobedient, just naive and gullible--perfectly understandable for someone who just came to life less than a day ago. And it's still pretty irresponsible of Geppetto to send Pinocchio off to school alone (remember, Geppetto doesn't know about Jiminy Cricket).
ReplyDeleteTechnically in this remake Stromboli gets punished, but I do agree that I find it strange that with all the changes they made to make Pleasure Island less dark that the Coachman still gets off scot-free.
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