Sep 8, 2022

-Pinocchio Review Roundup: Solid Animation Can't Save Disney's Boring Remake

"Pinocchio," the latest reworking of Disney's animated classic, opened today on Disney+ and was met with negative reviews upon its release.

Fans of the Pinocchio story have and will continue to see the marionette in action, and most critics have been more interested in Disney's 1940 animated film and Academy Award-nominated director Matteo Garrone's 2019 film, or to wait and see what director Guillermo del Toro has in store for us when he delivers his stop-motion version on Netflix later this year.

Many of the available reviews question why this hybrid remake even exists in the first place. On Rotten Tomatoes, the critical score for Robert Zemeckis' Pinocchio is currently 32%. On Metacritic, on the other hand, it has received mixed reactions, with a low score of 41.

We read 12 of Rotten Tomatoes' top critic reviews (at the time of writing):

Here Pinocchio is a puppet-sized puppet, just as the original was. And he looks magnificent. The film's selling point, that iconic wooden boy, has been brought to life. But it is not a compelling reason for the film's existence.

Indiewire's Christian Zilko doesn't have much good to say about "Pinocchio" and even compares it to the pile of CG-animated dung that appears early in the film. However, he is impressed with the animation and considers it the most cinematic of the film:

Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a fine performance as Jiminy Cricket, even if his antennae are a little too cockroach-like, and the animated cricket explores the workshop scene is the film's most cinematic moment.

Carlos Aguilar, writing in the L.A. Times, argued that the overreliance on inferior digital backgrounds undermines the primary narrative of Pinocchio's story:

[F]or a film about being authentic, it is difficult to identify the physical elements on the screen Id. Zemeckis' Pinocchio appears to have been shot entirely on a green screen. Poor digital visuals include exaggerated lighting in daylight scenes and inadequate rendering between characters and environments.

The Wrap's Elizabeth Weitzman agreed with Aguilar's less than enthusiastic view of the film's digital work:

The effects are also not seamless and at times really choppy. There are some clever references to other excellent films (such as Zemeckis' live-action animation milestone "Who Framed Roger Rabbit"), but the film has no merit. The images, however, are at least dynamic enough to keep children watching.

Variety's Andrew Barker ranked it among the worst of the recent Disney remakes: [Robert Zemeckis's "Pinocchio" appears to be Guillermo del Toro's very different interpretation of Carlo Collodi's 19th century original months before the film was released and two years after Matteo Garrone's Academy Award-nominated film, which retells nearly every beat of the 1940 animated classic.

The Guardian's Adrian Houghton agrees in a three-star review:

The live-action adaptation of the classic cartoon has effective visual moments and impactful Tom Hanks cues, but it doesn't do its existence justice: ...... There is a strangeness to the whole proceedings - an unloved classic that has been sanded down from the 1883 original by Italian author Carlo Collodi and updated into an hour and 40-minute visually exciting but emotionally boring mishmash.

Whether the 1940 original is unloved (as Horton claims) will certainly be debated by many critics, but most agree that this 2022 iteration is worth skipping.