By Jake Wilson
Pinocchio ★★★
111 minutes
From Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Polar Express and beyond, director Robert Zemeckis has spent much of his career in the uncanny border country between live-action cinema and animation.
The pattern continues in his new version of Pinocchio, a Disney production modelled visually and tonally on the classic 1940 cartoon, with a small troupe of visible actors – led by Tom Hanks as the kindly woodcutter Geppetto – inhabiting a largely digital fantasy land.
Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Tom Hanks as Geppetto.
Voiced by newcomer Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, the film’s Pinocchio is uncanny in his own right, like every other incarnation of the character, a puppet who has human emotions yet isn’t quite a “real boy”.
Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz add a few story beats of their own and omit others, but for the most part, their hero’s moral education proceeds along expected lines.
Lovingly crafted by Geppetto and brought to life by the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), Pinocchio sets out to discover the world, with kindly Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as his conscience and guide.
At every step, villains strive to tempt him away from the path of virtue with offers of pleasure or fame (following Tim Burton’s underrated Dumbo, this is another authorised Disney remake with a surprisingly mordant view of showbiz in general).
The verbal jokes for adults barely raise a smile, but Zemeckis visually remains the pro he’s always been, moving smoothly through a stylised world. Following Welcome to Marwen and The Witches, this is his third film in a row cunningly built on contrasts of scale, with a main character who is physically smaller than life.
There are bizarre fleeting details, such as the clocks that fill Geppetto’s home (instead of a cuckoo emerging, one of them has a child being spanked on the hour). Sometimes you can’t tell how far the creepiness is intended, but that could be a device for making things creepy on a whole other level.
Creepiest of all, and most vividly imagined, is Pinocchio’s sojourn on Pleasure Island, a fairground built to lure little boys into letting their destructive impulses loose. The basic visual ideas may be lifted from the 1940 cartoon, but here dream turns to nightmare only gradually, meaning we viewers can be lured against our better judgment by the bright lights.
One measure of the oddity of this Pinocchio is that I’m still unsure whether its anti-climactic ending is a sign of artistic integrity or of a last-minute budget cut. I’m less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to Hanks, who has been assigned a bushy white wig and matching moustache as if he were playing Einstein, and duly clomps around chortling and wheezing.
As the flesh-and-blood star, his job is presumably to infuse a cold film with some human warmth. But in between this and his no less screen-hogging turn as Colonel Parker in Elvis, he appears to have reached the point where he feels he can give up acting and enjoy making a real fool of himself.
Pinocchio is on Disney+ from September 8.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.