Watch my nose and see that I am telling the truth: 2022 is the year of Pinocchio.
Way back in 1881 the Italian children’s series Le avventure di Pinocchio was published, and it’s been in the public domain since 1940, when Walt Disney promptly capitalised on it for his classic, terrifying animated adaptation. But only in 2022 are we getting three new versions from Guillermo del Toro (woah, spooky!), Robert Zemeckis (ooh, motion capture-y!) and uhhh Russian animation studio Luminescence (….let’s move on).
Disney’s high-tech remake of its own movie stars Tom Hanks as the benevolent carpenter Gepetto, breathing life into a puppet that looks exactly like a 3D-printed model of the original hand-drawn character design. It’s great if obvious casting, as Hanks typifies the loving screen dad and is a frequent collaborator with fantasy director Robert Zemeckis.
This Pinocchio will also star Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Cynthia Erivo as the kind Blue Fairy, and British child star Benjamin Evan Ainsworth as the youthful title character.
Taking a darker approach is Nightmare Alley auteur Guillermo del Toro, who has been slaving away (much like Gepetto!) on a stop-motion passion project with the same source material..
We’ve only got a quick teaser trailer so far for Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, arriving on Netflix this year, but we have his word that this 1930s-set Italian dark fable represents a career-long ambition coming true. “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”, he enthused.
So whose Blue Fairy are you more keen to see: Erivo, or del Toro’s Tilda Swinton? Gordon-Levitt’s Jiminy, or Ewan MacGregor’s boisterous ‘Sebastian J. Cricket’? And, most of all, why the hell are there so many Pinocchios (Pinocchii?) coming to our screens this year? This tweet claims that it’s all production company grifting.
Del Toro has been working on his for a decade. Disney is in the middle of a grift to extend their copyright claims on old properites and is releasing it now to undercut Del Toro. Lionsgate is just capitalizing on the other two with a cheap mockbuster. https://t.co/rZuHiPqoIG
— hareofhrair – 🌈 ♠️ (@hareofhrair) February 3, 2022
And about that third movie…all you really need to know if that the straight-to-DVD animation was briefly a Twitter meme because of how sarcastic and, well, twink-like its Pinocchio sounds in the clip below.
The moment I first heard Pinocchio's voice, it was just…magical. pic.twitter.com/rWzkesuOqm
— Mat Brunet (AniMat) (@AniMat505) February 1, 2022
That’s grown-ass man and 90s comedy mainstay Pauly Shore, BTW. I doubt either Zemeckis or del Toro will try to crib his iconic line reading of “father, when can I leave to be on my oOUUWWnnn?”
