Pinocchio ’22 (2022)

The first film adaptation of the 19th-century Italian stories by Carlo Collodi is the 1940 Disney Pinocchio, but no decade since has gone by without at least one movie or TV version. Last year, in fact, there were two. With a third from 2021, a Russian picture called Pinocchio: A True Story, that means the 2020s are already holding up their end of this bargain. Pinocchio is a live-action / CGI Disney that was directed and cowritten by Robert Zemeckis, starring Tom Hanks. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is what it sounds like. I haven’t, full disclosure, seen any of the other versions but I got a look at those two anyway along with the 1940. Start with the Zemeckis. On IMDb, some 38,000 voters have ranked this remake an aggregate 5.0. That’s not good—compare GdT’sP’s 92,000 going 7.6. It’s not hard to see why. One of these movies is clearly better than the other. Tom Hanks makes a creditable enough Geppetto but he can’t carry the whole thing. It is faithful to the 1940 version to a fault, practically scene for scene. It feels notably uninspired and insipid. It has little to add to or improve on the Disney original and the changes it makes can be almost comical. Pleasure Island, the destination for wayward boys, if you recall, was populated by boys playing pool, wantonly vandalizing property, and, above all, smoking stogies—all of them, including Pinocchio, whose face turned funny colors as a result.

But in 2022, images of smoking are frowned on and now part of routine content warnings, even if smokers are shown paying the price. Disney decided to take the easy way out with movie-rating panels and just cut the smoking out completely. All things considered, it’s probably the better idea for society at large, and it shows some of the ways things have changed since 1940. Here’s another one. An interesting plot point, which is that Geppetto had a wife and son who are now dead, was not in the 1940 version. It completely makes sense as motivation for Geppetto, of course, but when I first saw it cropping up in the 2022 version I took it as unnecessary embellishment. As a plot point, however, it is really front and center in del Toro’s workup of the story, which arguably turns on it, and makes me think it must come from the original stories by Collodi (which I haven’t read). In turn, it makes me wonder why it was taken out of the 1940 version. Including the point is ultimately one of the few improvements, all relatively minor, that the 2022 Zemeckis makes on the 1940. For his part, del Toro seems to be trying to restore some of the qualities of Collodi’s original stories. His Pinocchio is refreshingly sassy and headstrong, much like reports of the Collodi stories. Del Toro, not surprisingly, certainly has the best Blue Fairy of all of them—even the Zemickis version is an improvement on the saccharine 1940 lady.

Unencumbered by Disney’s family-oriented priorities, del Toro lets the story range into much darker, more emotionally resonant and believable precincts. I’m not sure setting it in Fascist Italy was exactly the right way to go for this story, but at least it afforded a priceless cameo from Il Duce himself. And Del Toro is generally more focused on delving into Geppetto’s motivations to make a puppet and want it to be a real boy—it’s Geppetto who wants it, a simple and ingenious shift of emphasis that makes the story richer and more complex. Del Toro manages to take the story all the way into Cain and Abel stuff. Del Toro’s animation rivals the Disney original and is arguably even better, but there I think my judgment might be affected by how much better del Toro’s narrative is. The animation is very different but equally good in both. I’m not sure looking at these three Pinocchios in such close proximity is the way to do it. I’m sick of Monstro the whale and the nose-growing bits by now (del Toro goes to town on the nose thing much more than either of the others). I would recommend separating them out further than consecutive days. But the 1940 Disney and the 2022 del Toro are equally essential and I wouldn’t know which one to recommend first—probably the del Toro, if you’re an adult. The 2022 Zemeckis—sadly, because I have residual interest in his work—is eminently skippable.

Pinocchio (1940)

USA, 88 minutes

Directors: Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen

Writers: Carlo Collodi, Ted Sears, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, William Cottrell, Joseph Sabo, Erdman Penner, Aurelius Battaglia, Bill Peet, Frank Tashlin

Music: Leigh Harline, Paul J. Smith, Frank Churchill, Edward H. Plumb

Animators / editors: numerous

Cast: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Cliff Edwards, Evelyn Venable, Walter Catlett, Frankie Darro, Charles Judels, Mel Blanc, Walt Disney

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of Pinocchios have been showing up around here lately. There’s a Disney remake starring Tom Hanks as Geppetto and a long-in-the-making version by Guillermo del Toro, both of which came out just last year. Haven’t seen them yet. This 1940 fully animated Disney version is the first of a long line of movie and TV adaptations. It has felt like the original to me most of my life, but the wooden puppet—pine, if you please, source of his name—and wannabe boy actually goes back to a series of stories by the Italian author Carlo Collodi published in the 1880s. Among other things, Collodi’s Pinocchio is something of a reprobate and in fact ends up hanged from a tree by the Fox and the Cat. The scene as reported by Wikipedia is desolate: “[A wind] beat the poor puppet from side to side, making him swing violently, like the clatter of a bell ringing for a wedding.... His breath failed him and he could say no more. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave a long shudder, and hung stiff and insensible.”

There’s nothing quite so bleak or explicit in this 1940 picture, where the Fox is known as J. Worthington Foulfellow, or Honest John, and the Cat is called Gideon and set up to be a version of Harpo Marx. The best cat in Pinocchio belongs to the craftsman Geppetto, who builds Pinocchio. Its name is Figaro and it is a feisty, charming tuxedo cat who almost steals the show for as long as we are in the Geppetto household. But I digress. Of course, no one is going to be hanged to finish a Disney cartoon (I think?) but, in 1940, when there was much less inclination to acknowledge sensitivities, you could still have Pleasure Island and the fate of the lost boys who are kidnapped there. It’s enough to give one pause for thinking about it too much, not least because it invokes the specter of missing children.

Fantasia (1940)

USA, 125 minutes
Directors: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr., Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen
Writers: Joe Grant, Dick Huerner, Lee Blair, Elmer Plummer, Phil Dike, Sylvia Moberly-Holland, Norman Wright, Albert Heath, Bianca Majolie, Graham Heid, Perce Pearce, Carl Fallberg, William Martin, Leo Thiele, Robert Sterner, John McLeish, Otto Englander, Webb Smith, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Bill Peet, Vernon Stallings, Campbell Grant, Arthur Heineman
Photography: James Wong Howe
Music: Johann Sebastian Bach, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Paul Dukas, Igor Stravinsky, Ludwig van Beethoven, Amilcare Ponchielli, Modest Mussorgsky, Franz Schubert
Animators / editors: numerous
Cast: Deems Taylor, Leopold Stokowski

Is anyone still alive who saw this when it was new? It seems unlikely, as the release of "this new form of entertainment, Fantasia," is 80 years past now, a full lifetime. The pompous words are from the dweeby Deems Taylor, standing uncomfortably in formalwear he doesn't belong in, who is our host, master of ceremonies, and all-around Robert Osborne guy for the movie. He's really not wrong about "new form of entertainment," as the vast collaboration of Fantasia arguably produced the template, if not indeed the ultimate refinement and pinnacle, of what we'd later call music videos. Taylor, continuing, "Now, there are three kinds of music on this Fantasia program. First, there's the kind that tells a definite story. Then there's the kind that, while it has no specific plot, does paint a series of more or less definite pictures. And then there's a third kind, music that exists simply for its own sake."

As it happens, the third kind tends to be my favorite here and it seems to be what gets Taylor most amped up himself, as when, after the intermission (Fantasia is also old-fashioned in many small comforting ways), he carries on a conversation with "the soundtrack," represented by psychedelic symmetrical shapes and colors corresponding to musical instruments playing. In many ways it's the forerunner to computer screensavers and those hypnotic visualizers digital music players used to have.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

USA, 83 minutes
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Writers: John Musker, Ron Clements, Hans Christian Andersen, Howard Ashman, Gerrit Graham, Sam Graham, Chris Hubbell
Art direction: Michael Peraza Jr., Donald Towns
Music: Alan Menken
Editor: Mark A. Hester
Cast/voices of: Jodi Benson, Pat Carroll, Samuel E. Wright, Buddy Hackett, Rene Auberjonois, Christopher Daniel Barnes, Paddi Edwards, Jason Marin, Kenneth Mars, Edie McClurg, Will Ryan, Ben Wright

The Little Mermaid is likely best known today as the picture that launched the Disney Renaissance, marking a return to form for the studio of a certain level of charm and brio. Following the deaths of co-founders Walt and Roy Disney in the '60s and '70s, the company had spent years wandering the deserts of mediocrity. After The Little Mermaid would come Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and many others through the '90s, most of them massive moneymakers. It may be tempting to locate the start of any such renaissance back one year, to the studio's collaboration with Steven Spielberg in 1988 on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In many ways, that's the picture that restored interest among mainstream audiences in feature-length animated entertainment (or semi-animated, as it mixes live action with the cartoons). But Roger Rabbit, for all its many impressive virtues, is hardly in the Disney style.

That would be the job of The Little Mermaid. No doubt there are volumes of behind-the-scenes corporate backstory to this movie, involving industry players, gutsy business calls, and various career-making and -breaking maneuvers. It's also easy enough to pick out various elements and call "formula"—yet another princess story based on yet another Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, yet another musical, and, as always, damnably cute more than 70% of the time. But in the end that's incidental to what ended up on the screen. In the watching, The Little Mermaid is one of those happy accidents where all pieces fall together and the result is something close to an ideal, achieved seemingly effortlessly.