Seen That? Watch This is a weekly column from critic Luke Buckmaster, taking a new release and matching it to comparable works. This week, annoyed by the awful new Pinocchio, he revisits the greatest film based on the famous fairy tale.
Pinocchio (2022)
Perhaps it’s a bit mean to describe old mate Pinocchio’s new film as “dead on arrival.” The famous wooden puppet, who just wants to be a real boy, is probably sensitive to the question of whether he’s alive or just a slab of carved timber. “Am I real?”, the new Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) asks the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) early in his latest adaptation, directed by veteran Robert Zemeckis.
The fairy answers in the irritating style of “yes, but…” She announces a cruel caveat: in order to be “truly real” the protagonist must prove that he’s “brave, thoughtful and unselfish.” A twee line like that may have connected with audiences in 1940, when Disney’s first Pinocchio movie arrived. But in the cynicism-choked stench and stupor of 2022 it sure feels like a tough ask; by that criteria almost nobody in the world would be real.
Besides, we soon learn that actual boys in this world enjoy things like drinking beer and smashing stuff (meaning they’re not…truly real?!). This tomfoolery takes place in that well-known palace of hedonism known as Pleasure Island. But such behaviour is very bad, very very naughty, so the prudish gods of the Pinocchio-verse punish the ill-behaving pipsqueaks by transforming them into donkeys.
This of course makes absolutely no sense. Pinocchio’s moral compass flaps about hysterically, like a drunken parent attempting to lecture their child. This is why, while I love many aspects of the 1940 film, I’m uncomfortable with heralding it as a masterpiece.
And the new one? Good lord. It is very much not a masterpiece. This arduously slow film plonks us in Geppetto’s workshop and only leaves half an hour in. Every scene drags on well after the emotional meaning has been conveyed. And Pinocchio himself is intensely irritating, prancing about with such merry abandon, so blithely ignorant of the world around him, I wanted to rush up to this little git and push his wretched woody body into a puddle of mud.
That is admittedly a step up from Roberto Benigni’s just plain creepy portrayal of Pinocchio in his 2002 adaptation. The Italian actor looks spritely for his age, but he was 50 years old at the time. The stupidly titled Pinocchio: A True Story, from 2021, fared no better (absolute junk) and I wasn’t impressed with the 2019 version either, which took seriously its mission to conjure a little boy who looks like wood (and vice versa). The problem is that a little boy who looks like wood (and vice versa) looks freaky and dead-eyed. The sight of the protagonist hanging in a noose didn’t exactly charm audiences either.
So, what’s the greatest Pinocchio movie? If there is such a thing as a Pinocchio “purist” they may be disappointed to discover my answer is not technically a Pinocchio adaptation. However Steven Spielberg’s 2001 masterpiece A.I. Artificial Intelligence—the director’s best post-millenium film by far—is more than merely Pinocchio-esque. It’s the same essential premise updated with a robot (or “mecha child”) instead of a puppet.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Spielberg directly acknowledges this connection in a sequence following the robo-protagonist David (Haley Joel Osment) as he navigates to an underwater location called “The Land of Pinocchio.” Operating a submarine-esque vessel, and accompanied by a robot teddy bear, David makes his way past a life-sized replica of Geppetto’s workshop, featuring a model of the woodcarver with hammer and chisel in hand. He finds a statue of the Blue Fairy and makes a wish: “please please make me into a real, live boy.”
Whereas the moral compass of the standard Pinocchio tale oscillates wildly, Spielberg’s is nuanced and thoughtful, hinged not on the pseudo boy’s longing to be human but the bolder question of what obligation humans have to their creations. Responding to William Hurt’s Geppetto-equivalent inventor, who proposes “we build a robot who can love,” a colleague asks: “If a robot can love a person, what responsibility does a person have to love them back?”
Set in a future world decimated by the climate crisis, the story begins with David being adopted into a nuclear family, where he’s picked on by his human brother and ultimately discarded. David is captured by the organisers of a “Flesh Fair”—a new version of “Pleasure Island.” Except instead of this carnival-like location condemning boys for hedonism, it exposes the barbarianism of adults, who get their kicks by watching robots being brutally destroyed. Spielberg uses cyborgs the way George Romero used zombies: as allegorical tools to make painful observations about real-world bigotry.
Programmed to love his “mother” Monica (Frances O’Connor), David wants nothing other than her love in return—believing the best chance of obtaining it is to become a real boy (thus his quest for the Blue Fairy). He’s assisted by a robot sex worker, Jude Law’s Gigolo Joe, whose been framed for murder, and whose poignant final lines linger with deep melancholy: “I am. I was.” But ultimately David is alone, like Pinocchio. Haley Joel Osment’s great performance blurs yearning emotion with an air of unreality and uncertainty. Do we care for this character because he really feels, or are we projecting our emotions onto him?
A.I. Artificial Intelligence is boldly structured and courageously humane. The final act jumps forward 2000 years (from an already futuristic starting point) and reaches an ending of ethereal beauty and spirituality, rooted in a kind of cosmic, existential longing. Disney, Benigni, Zemeckis: eat your heart out.
