‘Pinocchio’ Review: Robert Zemeckis Offers a Lavish But Hollow Remake of the Disney Classic
variety.comAndrew Barker Senior Features Writer At this point, complaining about Disney’s deathless drive to cannibalize its entire library of animated classics into live-action remakes can feel as futile as complaining about capitalism itself.
The studio has immense IP resources to exploit, a hungry well of content to fill, and a commercial imperative to introduce new generations of kids to the characters they’ll soon be expected to recognize on merch and in theme parks.
And in truth, the studio could be doing a lot worse with these trawls through the archives. Once in a while genuine inspiration strikes (as it did with the gothy, revisionist “Maleficent,” or Jon Favreau’s visually inventive “The Jungle Book”), and even the least-fortunate of these remakes have mostly just been forgettable.
And yet something feels particularly unnecessary about the Robert Zemeckis-directed “Pinocchio,” which revisits nearly every beat of the 1940 animated classic just months before Guillermo del Toro is set to unveil what appears to be a wildly different interpretation of Carlo Collodi’s nineteenth century source material, and two years after Matteo Garrone offered his own Oscar-nominated spin.
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