My nose is not growing when I tell you the year 2022 brings us not one, not two, but THREE takes on the “Pinocchio” fable, starting with the currently streaming but mostly forgotten, Russian-made “Pinocchio: A True Story” from earlier this year, which featured Pauly Shore (!) as the voice of the wooden lad, and continuing with two decidedly more prestigious projects: the Robert Zemeckis live-action musical fantasy “Pinocchio,” debuting this week on Disney+, followed by the release of Guillermo del Toro’s stop-motion story, which is scheduled for a November release.
That’s a LOT of Pinocchio, especially considering we’ve had so many adaptations of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 tale through the years — most notably Disney’s 1940 classic, which remains one of the most beloved and beautiful and acclaimed animated films of all time. Do we really need another, and then another, version of “Pinocchio”? In the case of the Zemeckis film, which stars Tom Hanks as the live-action Geppetto, Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jiminy Cricket, Benjamin Even Ainsworth as Pinocchio and Cynthia Erivo as the Blue Fairy, the answer is something along the lines of “Sure, why not.”
