a puppet who becomes a pixel boy

After having been, before the summer, the perverse and selfish puppeteer of an innocent rockstar (Elvisof Baz Luhrmann), here is Tom Hanks as an altruistic creator of a puppet freed from his sons. In the role of Geppetto, the actor finds Robert Zemeckis, master of Hollywood artifice who directed him in Forrest Gump (1994). We find in flashes what makes the singularity of these two talents – the immense dramatic culture of Hanks, who is inspired here by the actors of composition of the golden age of the studios (Victor Moore in Place for young peopleby Leo McCarey, in 1937, for example), and the plastic inventiveness of Zemeckis (in Geppetto’s studio, each pendulum is sculpted on a theme borrowed from animated films, from Snow White at Who Framed Roger Rabbit?).

It is still and always a question of passing a veneer of reality on universes created a few decades earlier by the animators of Disney

Despite the amount of talent invested in the project, this remake of the second feature film from the Disney studio, eighty-two years ago, remains a product part of a commercial strategy which, for the moment, has not given (with the exception of Dumboby Tim Burton, in 2019) than tasteless products. Since the first experiments (101 Dalmatiansby Stephen Herek, with Glenn Close, in 1996, followed by 102 Dalmatiansby Kevin Lima, with Gérard Depardieu, in 2000), it is again and again a question of putting a varnish of reality on universes created a few decades earlier by the animators of Disney.

Originally, the real effect was obtained by entrusting the human roles to actors, by constructing sets in three dimensions. Over the years, the actors – initially essential in the device – have given way to digital creatures, a hegemony whose side effects are sometimes unexpected. Look what happens with this adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s text: Geppetto is therefore a skilled craftsman who has kept the soul of a child. He lives and works in the square of an Italian town with finely detailed architecture.

Trivial silhouette and figure

In his studio, he has accumulated objects that testify to a constant plastic invention. But when he sets out to carve a puppet out of a block of pine wood, he produces a soulless object that one would think bought at the nearest Disney Store. The Pinocchio of 2022 looks exactly like that of 1940. But the stylized silhouette and the charming chubby figure, drawn and painted in Indian ink on Celluloid, become trivial here.

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