2 No. / Why Pinocchio is pulling everyone’s strings
With three films due this year, we explore Hollywood’s ongoing obsession with a small wooden puppet
PINOCCHIO, THE LITTLE boy who started off as a humble block of wood, never had it so good: there are three cinematic versions coming to life this year. Pinocchio: A True Story, a Russian animated feature by Vasiliy Rovenskiy, is out in May; Robert Zemeckis’ live-action take, with Tom Hanks as Geppetto, is rumoured to hit Disney+ this summer; while Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion film reaches Netflix in December.
The first is a curio: the dubbed English release has Pinocchio voiced by a 54-year-old Pauly Shore. The trailer went viral in January, quickly becoming a Tiktok sensation, with people imitating Shore’s lethargic vocal performance. But it will hardly dent the timber tyke’s reputation.
2022 is the year of the puppet, although that is a coincidental confluence. Zemeckis’ one was announced in 2015; del Toro first mentioned his in 2008.
“No art form has influenced my life and my work more than animation and no single character in history has had as deep of a personal connection to me as Pinocchio,” the latter has said. Pinocchio, 1883’s darkly fantastical children’s morality tale by Italian satirist Carlo Collodi, is many filmmakers’ white whale.
There’s something about it that takes hold of film directors. 2020 saw the release of Matteo Garrone’s beautiful adaptation, with Geppetto played by Roberto Benigni — who starred as the boy himself in his own 2002 version. Francis Ford Coppola tried and failed in the 1990s; Stanley Kubrick wanted a go in the late 1990s, even though he had already developed A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, a story about a robot boy which, during the writing stage, he referred to as ‘Pinocchio’; Tim Burton was attached to one around 2012. There were reports of Paul Thomas Anderson making one for Robert Downey Jr., although that wasn’t quite true, the director tells Empire.
“It was certainly a possibility,” he says — they’d discussed it, but nothing happened. “I am a huge Pinocchio fan. I love Pinocchio as a story. I mean, who doesn’t?”
Indeed, it’s an exciting challenge for filmmakers. The book is episodic, and you need to take liberties with it to make it sing on screen, as Walt Disney’s outlandish 1940 classic did.
It is visually rich, teeming with wonderful creatures, lending itself to the myriad takes we’re getting this year, and it is ripe for personal interpretation. Del Toro’s film is set during the Mussolini era — a political adaptation which, he has said, is “not a film for all the family to enjoy”. It doesn’t have to be for kids.
Pinocchio has it all: morality, fantasy, social politics, loss of innocence, corruption, coming of age, fatherhood, and talking animals. It’s catnip for creatives. Every year can be the year of the puppet.