Just when you thought no interpretation of an Italian accent could be more offensive than what occurred in House of Gucci, Robert Zemeckis comes along and decides Tom Hanks should be cast as Gepetto in Pinocchio. Apart from offering botched musical stylings (that discount the presence of classics like “Give A Little Whistle”), why he felt obliged to remake this particular movie is anyone’s guess (other than the obvious answer of: money). The same went for The Witches, except now, one can safely say even that movie is preferable to the schlock that is his version of Pinocchio.
Being that Tom Hanks has been there time and time again for Zemeckis—whether it was for Forrest Gump, Cast Away, or The Polar Express—maybe he felt obliged to perform as Zemeckis’ “muse” for this as well. Even though the story itself is clearly rooted in Italian culture. Not in Midwestern “culture” (with Zemeckis hailing from Chicago), a perspective from which “Italians” (put in quotes whenever Americans and Italian-Americans are involved in their portrayal) can never be rendered accurately. One shouldn’t need to spell that out based on the title alone, but, evidently, it’s necessary.
Originally conceived and written by Carlo Collodi in 1883, the text itself favored heavy usage of the Tuscan dialect. In fact, the name Geppetto is a nickname for Geppo, which is how Tuscans pronounce the Italian word for log, “ceppo.” In this “edition” of Pinocchio, Gepetto is certain to mention he wants to call his “son” by the eponymous title because “pino” means pine, which is what he’s crafted out of, failing to mention that “occhio” is Italian for “eye” at any point, likely because Tom Hanks’ Gepetto isn’t Italian, so much as modeled after an over-enthusiastic server at Buca di Beppo. The lacking explanation of allusions aside, there are many other things Pinocchio gets wrong.
Not just the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) appearing only once in the tale, but also that no mention is made of how she’s part of the magic that causes his nose to grow whenever he lies. Instead, it “just happens” at one point when Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) is locked up in a cage and uses his “fibs” to make his nose grow so that Jiminy Cricket (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, oddly enough) can reach the key. Here, too, is where the Blue Fairy is actually supposed to appear to get him out of his bind. The Blue Fairy even manages to communicate once more later on in the movie, this time through a dove that informs Jiminy and Pinocchio that Gepetto left his workshop in search of Pinocchio, only to end up in the belly of a gigantic whale named Monstro.
Zemeckis instead cuts out the dove (and with it, another de facto nod to the Blue Fairy’s ubiquitousness) and replaces it with a less graceful bird: a seagull named Sofia (Lorraine Bracco, a long way from The Sopranos). This bird materializes multiple times in the movie and has a particularly non sequitur line when Gepetto puts some trash out for her to eat. In fact, one could say the entire remake is a series of non sequiturs, including the addition of a new character named Fabiana (Kyanne Lamaya), who wields a puppet of her own named Sabina that seems to tickle Pinocchio’s nonexistent pickle. Indeed, it is only when Fabiana speaks as Sabina that Pinocchio fully trusts her. After all, one would tend to become mistrustful of humans after being sold down the river by Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key) the fox and his feline cohort, Gideon (who is perpetually silent, therefore needs no actor to voice him). The ones who cajole him into joining Stromboli’s (Giuseppe Battiston) traveling puppet show. But not immediately, for Jiminy is still around to urge him against it.
Time works differently in Zemeckis’ version as well, with Gepetto waiting a bit before sending Pinocchio off to school, whereas in the 1940 original, he goes the very next day after becoming a “real boy,” or at least an animated puppet with lifelike capabilities. As though to align more closely with the on-trend subject matters of bullying and wokenesss, Zemeckis sees fit to briefly show us Pinocchio getting ostracized by the students and the headmaster (Jamie Demtriou) for being patently different from the rest of them, as though ersatz body parts aren’t something we all end up with sooner or later. But in the OG film, Pinocchio never makes it to school at all.
It would also appear that Zemeckis and co-writer Chris Weitz have taken the opportunity to update some of the dialogue from Honest John to really get a dig in about how you’re not “real” in this life unless you’re famous (“you’re nobody until you’re somebody”). A phenomenon that wasn’t quite so sought-after by the hoi polloi in the era during which Pinocchio is supposed to exist. Ah, simpler times—that epoch when “fame” (a.k.a. virality) wasn’t democratizable through social media.
As for the timeline of Pleasure Island, Gepetto is made aware of Pinocchio’s presence there as a result of Sofia passing him a flier meant to signal the puppet’s whereabouts to his “father.” This prompts him to sell all his clocks (also not a factor in 1940’s Pinocchio) and buy a boat to set off in search of his “boy.” In the other movie, however, Gepetto has already been swallowed by Monstro, and there is no scene of Pinocchio chasing after him attached by a rope to a seagull until they both end up in the whale’s mouth together. Except Zemeckis decided it shouldn’t be a whale, so much as a whale-like creature with tentacles. More arbitrary liberties, one supposes.
Zemeckis also apparently wanted to tweak the ending, with Figaro the Cat, Cleo the Goldfish and Pinocchio all believing that Gepetto has died as a result of the boat crash caused by Monstro when, in the original, it was Gepetto and co. who believe Pinocchio to be dead, only to be “resuscitated” by the Blue Fairy.
While Pinocchio is undeniably wholesome despite his lack of a conscience in both Disney interpretations of the story, the character is far more impish in Collodi’s original imagining, with his roguish behavior meant to be a cautionary tale more than a story designed to place a constant emphasis on the “conscience” factor that the Disney iteration so loves to play up. Everything going back to the moral, “Let your conscience be your guide.” But obviously, Jiminy Cricket never showed up for the likes of Donald Trump and his cronies, and certainly not Putin, which makes one wonder if the movie ought to actually be required global viewing for children (again, the original, not this Zemeckis atrocity).
But even the original feature isn’t without some faults. For instance, no one knows why Disney was inclined to outfit their Pinocchio in Lederhosen (which, at best, would be the “costume” of some very Northern Italians, far past Tuscany), but that’s part of what contributes to the overall creep factor of the dynamic between Gepetto and his “boy.” Pedophilic overtones aside, the claim made at the end by Zemeckis’ Jiminy is: Pinocchio, even if not a “real real” boy, is just that in every way because he is brave, truthful and unselfish. One hates to be the bearer of bad news to Jiminy, but most boys (and, later, men) see that definition as the antithesis of “real boy” status. Regardless of being subjected to a highly moralistic tale such as this one. If anything, this version will push boys (like the Trumps and the Putins of the world) in the opposite direction of what Zemeckis wants to promote as “uprightness.”
At least in the original, the Blue Fairy shows up at the end to make us see that he does get turned into a real boy without all this “winking” open-endedness favored by Zemeckis. What’s more, when he becomes a real boy, the donkey aspects of his body that got slapped on at Pleasure Island are also removed. Zemeckis, alternately, opts for the ears and tail to go in an earlier scene during which he has an exchange with the previously nonexistent character of Fabiana, refusing her offer to star in her now ethical traveling puppet show (because we’re supposed to believe the Carabinieri would arrest Stromboli for maltreatment of his employees). It’s this unselfish act of choosing to remain with Jiminy and go in search of Gepetto that prompts the donkey parts to disappear, underscoring that Pinocchio is ever-closer to becoming “real” because of how pure of heart he is.
But however “pure” the intentions of Zemeckis in taking obvious liberties with his live-action remake, the result is an utter decimation. And sure, what would become Disney’s second animated feature also took plenty of its own liberties compared to Collodi’s source material. Yet what Zemeckis has done with the story is not only make it objectively inferior to the original, as well as an insult to Italians by casting Tom Hanks as Gepetto, but also prompt us to wonder, yet again, what the purposes of these live-action remakes really are, apart from another bid to make more money off the same movie, bastardized just enough to be deemed “different but the same.”
