When the widowed woodcarver, Geppetto (Tom Hanks), makes a wish upon a star one night, he is visited by the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) while he is asleep in his bed. She grants his wish for his boy back, and breathes life into Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth), a marionette the old man had carved in his loneliness. When Geppetto awakes to find Pinocchio, the man is overcome with joy, but it soon turns to distress when Pinocchio goes missing on his way to school and falls in with a seedy crowd that promises fame and fortune at the price of Pinocchio’s morals. 

Robert Zemeckis, with a co-written script by Chris Weitz, reteams with Hanks for Disney’s straight-to-streaming, “live-action” modernization of their 1940 classic. It is not just the uncanny valley of the animated characters that make this updated version feel a little off, but the entire production design is so manufactured and overworked that everything blends into the same dull and boring brown color palette. Like many of the titles that came before it, Pinocchio is a major fall from grace that never quite captures the same magic of its 2D ancestor, instead feeling hollow and lifeless, inspiring nothing. 

The film opens with the narration and introduction of Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a sentient cricket who will eventually take on the role of Pinocchio’s conscience. Cliff Edward’s lent his voice to the insect some 60 years ago, and Gordon-Levitt dons a very serviceable impersonation of the iconic character, unfortunately, this means he does not get to bring much of his own inspirations and motivations to the role. Instead, he is forced into the template, made worse by Jiminy’s less-than-reliable status as a narrator often finding himself left behind by the machination of the plot and having to rush after Pinocchio. His spotty attendance throughout the duration of the film is just one aspect of the overarching flaw of this iteration of Carlo Collodi’s characters; there is no flow. 

There is a bright point in the film, and that is young Ainsworth in his first role as a voice actor. He brings a lot of joy, excitement, and wonder to Pinocchio which is vital to the character as he discovers the world around him – up to and including a pile of horse manure on the street. It is not enough to shed the over-reliance on CGI environments that leaves the film feeling cold, but it is nice to see that the title character is the true star of his own film. There are not many human characters in the film, but the few that are there all seem to struggle – Stromboli (Giuseppe Battiston) and the Coachman (Luke Evans) were told to simply be generically menacing and therefore become instantly forgettable villains of the tale, Lampwick (Lewin Lloyd) is saddled with some awful writing as a rough and tumble street rat, and even Hanks himself cannot seem to find his footing in this unnatural world. 

The most disappointing thing about Pinocchio is how safe and sterile Disney has played their hand in making it. There is a version of this film that would use a practical puppet, removing the strings in post when he comes alive, but instead, the decision was made to render Pinocchio entirely as a computer image. And it did not just stop there, they did not use effect technology to enhance the world of the film, but rather to build it. There is an artistry in visual effects, for sure, but the pure commercial approach taken here is nothing except disheartening. The artistic choices that were made here, which extend to the complete animation of Figaro the cat and Sophia the seagull, are at least consistent in their laziness. They do not seem out of place in their surroundings, but that does not back into meaning that their surroundings are good. 

Pinocchio is just the latest classic title to be brought into the modern age, and despite the almost across-the-board poor workmanship on these reimaginings, Disney keeps putting their properties through the meat grinder. Again, it cannot be stressed enough that this is not a slight against the VFX artists who were undoubtedly spread thin under the fore-mouse’s demanding eye, but for a studio that brought magic to the screen decades before, it is an absolute disgrace that this is what they are doing now. It is lazier than paint by numbers. Lazier than just phoning it in. That this is what was dumped into the Disney+ algorithm after surely being signed off by dozens of producers, it just reeks of apathy and indifference. The splitting of hairs between what is a “film” and what is a “movie” is pure nonsense, but whatever side of the argument one falls on, it can safely be agreed that Pinocchio fits into a separate category; Content: that which is quickly made to be quickly consumed and just as quickly, forgotten. Catalog fodder.