Film Tag: Animation

Enzo D’Aló’s colorful and musical re-telling of this classic tale hews much closer to both the spirit and plot of Carlo Collodi’s original story than the Disney version, with Pinocchio remaining for most of the picture a rambunctious, easily-distracted, and unrepentant little scamp, who dances and trips from one strange adventure to the next in a surreal, Alice in Wonderland-like ride that never quite takes a pause. Mere moments after Geppetto has whittled a talking log into the son he never had, his newborn marionette offspring is already causing him grief. And though Cricket, Blue Fairy, and others point him on the right path, our anti-hero prefers to play hooky, and finds himself at the mercy of a host of outlandish — and strikingly animated — characters almost too numerous to recount: an evil marionette master and a lurid-green fishmonger, cat and fox con-artists, a pair of bowler-hatted bobby officers who look like something out of Yellow Submarine – landing at last in a phantasmagoric amusement park-turned-factory camp, where little boys are turned into donkeys and made to work from morning to night. In the end, after escaping from these and other predicaments, Pinocchio finds himself in the belly of a giant shark, where he is reunited with his dear papa and seems finally to have learned what it means to be good.