Check out Robert Zemeckis’ Pinocchio and Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, (premiered just three months apart on Disney+ and Netflix respectively), for a stark object lesson in corporate versus artistic thinking.
The bloated Disney media consortium, with its imperial reach and limitless resources, is so devoid of creative thought that it has lately been producing overlong live-action remakes of its most popular past successes, with diminishing audience approval, such as Dumbo, Cinderella and Aladdin. They dangle money in front of auteurs like Tim Burton to helm these projects but then drive the poor men to drink with incessant micromanagement via board meeting notes and market research. (Burton has recently stated that he found his experience doing Dumbo so miserable that he would never work for Disney again.) Robert Zemeckis, once the A-list director of hits like Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is not a hack, but, like Burton, he’s been turned into one anyway.
The Disney omnicorp regarded its own 1940 animated Pinocchio - a great classic that has influenced generations of artists in many fields - as just another IP to plunder, and the result is predictably hollow. The Disney model is to strap their beloved property to a table and forcibly inject it with steroids, schmaltz, smug pop culture references, poop jokes, and passive progressive lip service to “diversity” by making every third supporting character black, no matter how implausible in a story presumably set in 19th century Italy. The film is so elongated that, at 25 minutes in, Geppetto is still just barely learning that his puppet Pinocchio has come to life. At one point, Geppetto and Jiminy Cricket have been absent from the story for so long, while Pinocchio is off battling Lord of the Rings-style monsters and villains, that it’s startling when they reappear to participate in the climax.
Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro, who has loved Walt Disney's Pinocchio since childhood, had been trying to make his own adaptation and calling it his passion project since 2008. Despite being an Oscar winner, he could not find a single major studio to finance his idea, until Netflix got involved in 2018. A palpable labor of love, del Toro’s film achieves the miraculous by fusing his dark and wondrous vision with Carlo Collodi’s original novel and his own genuine nostalgia for the Disney film, the elements of which he could not make direct reference to thanks to modern Disney’s ownership of them as they made their competing remake. Potential backers suggested he discard his planned use of stop-motion animation to ease production time and costs, but del Toro persisted, and his reasons are visible on screen. Three-dimensional, hand-made figures both underscore and take meaning from the theme of creation in the story, from the carpenter Geppetto's craftsmanship to the protagonist’s existential quest to become "a real boy.” Animation is bringing something to the semblance of life, just as the fairy's magic animates a puppet without making it an actual human. Del Toro also folds in elements derived from Frankenstein and WWII-era Italy to create something truly genuine, unique and personal. Modern Disney's mix of weepy clichés and loud, awkward jauntiness is replaced by del Toro’s warm embrace of the story’s high emotions. Disney’s pitifully craven virtue signaling is replaced by del Toro’s unambiguous mockery of fascism, which only reads as valid due to his lack of interest in cynical tokenism. The Disney remake includes all of the memorable details of the 1940 original, even the songs, but none of the magic. Del Toro’s film makes do without those same elements and yet is all magic.
If anyone with some vision was in charge at Disney, they could easily have given del Toro carte blanche to make the film he wanted to make and they would now have an artistic triumph on their hands that will win awards and be re-watched forever as a part of del Toro’s oeuvre. But they don’t care about such things. They were only obligated to plop fresh content onto their streaming buffet, so that’s all they did. However, these masterminds spent $150 million for this soggy piece of pizza that’s already being forgotten, while del Toro’s gourmet meal that’s received near universal acclaim only cost $35 million. In any normal business, heads would roll over such a massive failure, but at Disney, they get to just keep announcing more soulless remake projects.
If you've always wanted to watch Tom Hanks in a wig doing an Italian accent, by all means enjoy the Disney/Zemeckis remake. If you want to see something beautiful, cinematic and inspiring, there is Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.
No comments:
Post a Comment