Pinocchio keeps Disney’s live-action-remake curse rolling along
Though some of Disney’s big-budget live-action remakes of its hand-drawn animated classics have performed well financially, they’ve almost uniformly struggled creatively. David Lowery is the only director who’s cracked the code: His tender 2016 remake of Pete’s Dragon makes an old film feel fresh and new by telling a story that actually is fresh and new. Unfortunately, remakes of Aladdin, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and others had less room to stretch. If people pay to see a remake of a beloved Disney favorite, they expect to see the greatest hits on repeat, from the songs to the signature moments. So audiences can only expect so much new material. And it often comes in small interstitial moments, like the bit in the 2019 Lion King where the adult Simba kicks up a tuft of leaves that float through the breeze and eventually land in front of the wizened old mandrill Rafiki — after a pit stop in a ball of giraffe dung.
Regretfully and inexplicably, animal excrement also prominently features in Disney’s latest bit of self-cannibalization, Robert Zemeckis’ remake of the 1940 classic Pinocchio. Like the animated version, the straight-to-Disney Plus live-action remake tells the story of a wooden marionette (a CG creation voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) brought to life by a magical Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo), who sends him on a journey to become fully human by exemplifying the traits of bravery, truthfulness, and selflessness.
As in the original movie (and the Carlo Collodi children’s book it adapts), Pinocchio encounters anthropomorphized animals like Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Honest John the fox (Keegan-Michael Key). There’s a cruel, mustachioed impresario named Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston), the
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