Dueling ‘Pinocchios’: Why del Toro Trumps Zemeckis

The little wooden puppet who longs to be a real boy is having quite the movie year.

Based on Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, the character has been reborn in the form of two lavish, state of the art 2022 films from distinguished directors. In the hands of Robert Zemeckis, his “Pinocchio” (on Disney +) was a live-action, mostly faithful adaptation of the classic 1940 Disney animated film.

A very different take on the character emerges as “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” (on Netflix) is an expectedly quirky and dark stop-motion animated film.

First the bad news: Zemeckis’ film is indigestible and somehow even worse than his recent botch of “The Witches” (2020).

Some directors have flourished when connecting with the ongoing progress of computer-generated imagery and...

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Dec 27th 2022
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