The Pinocchio fable's been teaching and terrifying children since the 18th century.
But the 2022 Disney live action retelling offers inside jokes, Easter eggs, and even
some innuendo for the adults who play attention.
The PG-rated Pincocchio features a couple of clever almost-but-not-quite swear words.
But it also features a very adult comment about human sexuality that's so subtle and
meandering that only older viewers listening closely would even notice.
Jiminy Cricket is the tool through which the filmmakers answer the perpetual burning question
at the center of the Pinocchio story: If Geppetto wants to make a child so badly, why does he
think making a puppet out of wood and then aggressively wishing for it to come to life
is the fastest and most effective way to make that happen?
Jiminy Cricket explains it away with a joke, laden with shade and double entendre.
When faced with the question, Jiminy Cricket remarks,
"Well, sure, there are other ways to make a boy.
But I don't think Geppetto gets out much and I guess it's the best he could do with the
tools he's got."
Ouch.
One of the most memorable moments in Disney's classic 1940 animated version of Pinocchio
was the Pleasure Island sequence.
While undoubtedly terrifying to younger viewers, the depiction of the consequences of a visit
to the kiddie chaotic dream world of fun and misadventure.
It had to be included in the live-action remake.
And it's a true spectacle, a dazzling, fireworks-laden display of amusement park rides, petty crime,
debauchery, and tomfoolery.
Kids can eat all the junk they want, shoplift, break stuff, and cheat death, only to learn
later that admission wasn't free, after all.
There's a steep price to be paid.
While the idea of "no such thing as a free lunch" or "every action has ramifications"
are lessons far more familiar to adults than they are to children, older viewers may also
find themselves at odds with the entire conceit of Pleasure Island.
After engaging in the delights of the park, Pinocchio and his new friend Lampwick are
transformed into donkeys.
It's all part of a nefarious plan by the park's organizers.
They lure in wayward youth and let them have all the fun they want.
After a good time, the park's dark magic transforms the kids into donkeys that are then sold off.
When you think about it, the enormous expense, level of detail, and work required to create
and maintain Pleasure Island doesn't seem worth the investment just to turn kids into
adorable but cheap pack animals.
Most any film adaptation of Pinocchio, including Disney's live-action 2022 version, is meant
for an audience of children, as it's based on a 19th century children's book and it's
about a child.
But Pinocchio also deals in some pretty heady concepts, ones that are beyond most children
and all but the most thoughtful and philosophically-minded of adults.
The Pinocchio fable, and the 2022 take in particular, is an exploration of ethics and
what it means to be human.
It asks if ethics are indeed what separates people from other animals or inanimate objects,
like a wooden boy.
For all intents and purposes, Pinocchio is made a real-life boy just after Geppetto builds
him, thanks to some magic from the Blue Fairy.
However, while he's technically a human, Pinocchio is made to think that this status is provisional.
That he won't really be real until he's lived a little bit and –
"You have to prove that you are brave, truthful, and unselfish."
In other words, he has to prove his humanity and understand it before he can claim it.
At the end of the film, Pinocchio is still made of wood, but he's learned those lessons
and is thus declared a real person.
The 2022 Disney-produced live-action "Pinocchio" earned a PG rating, meaning that it's friendly
to families and palatable to all but the youngest of children who might take issue with some
of the more frightening and distressing moments of the film when Pinocchio or Geppetto find
themselves in extreme danger.
That PG rating is also a short way of saying "there are no bad words in this movie."
This isn't to say, however, that the screenwriters weren't totally able to get around Disney's
cleanliness mandate and a desire for a very mild rating from the MPAA.
They inserted some bits that work as wordplay but which really subvert the PG rating to
get in a couple of adults-only phrases.
Jiminy Cricket, the external and appointed conscience of Pinocchio is similarly the conscience
of the audience, its surrogate in the crazy, fantasy world of the film.
He openly questions the proceedings often, at one point rhetorically asking, "What the
cuss is that all about?"
Instead of saying a cuss word, he just says the word cuss as if it were a cuss word, an
effective profanity-replacement lifted from Wes Anderson's PG-and-urbane Fantastic Mr.
Fox.
"The cuss you are."
"The cuss am I?
Are you cussing with me?"
"Are you cussing with me?"
Then, after Lampwick turns into a donkey but is not yet aware he's a donkey, he aggressively
asks Pinocchio,
"What do I look like to you?
A jackass?"
He means literally, in that a jackass is another name for a donkey, but it works on the other,
metaphorical, slightly profane level, too.
Over a lifetime of consuming media, older viewers are conditioned to react emotionally
to narrative storytelling.
The 2022 version of Pinocchio spends its first third connected to Geppetto, sympathizing
with and pitying the lonely old man who just wants to know the joys of fatherhood.
Viewers then celebrate along with him when his marionette Pinocchio comes to life.
But there's an abrupt disconnect when, almost immediately after fulfilling his ageless wish
to be a dad, Geppetto seemingly washes his hands of it all.
"Maybe it is time for you to go to school."
After Pinocchio comes to life in the middle of the night and Geppetto celebrates his magical
birth, he coldly tells him to go to school the very next morning.
He gives him some school supplies and opens the door.
He shows him the general direction in which he needs to go, what time he expects him home
that afternoon, and sends him on his way.
Geppetto shifts from warm to cold so fast that it's baffling.
He doesn't even walk Pinocchio to school or let the teacher know they'll have a new student.
He could at least spend some time with the new son he so desperately wanted.
In the 2022 Pinocchio, the Blue Fairy, played by Cynthia Erivo, tells Pinocchio that while
she has technically turned him human with her magic, he's not really a human until he
understands what that means.
He needs to live a little and build a code of ethics around being "brave, truthful, and
unselfish."
That's all well and good, but older Pinocchio watchers will notice that Pinocchio's not
at all prepared to go out in the world and learn anything.
Pinocchio is a blank slate.
"I'm the Blue Fairy."
"No, I'm the Blue Fairy."
Before he sets off for school and, unsurprisingly, winds up having a series of horrible and near
deadly misadventures, Pinocchio has only been alive for a few hours.
He has no inner life, no frame of reference, no background, and no memories.
He deals with the world as it comes to him, so he's bound to make a few mistakes.
"I don't want to be a jerk.
I want to be a real boy."
For example, he's overly trusting of shady strangers like so-called Honest John.
And he doesn’t pick up on clues that danger is around the corner, as with Pleasure Island.
Then he's chided, chastised, and punished for allowing himself to fall into so many
moral and physical traps — ones he didn't even know existed.
Pinocchio lets others take advantage of him, but how could he avoid it under the circumstances?
In the 2022 Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket is a complicated, dark figure with what seems to
be a sketchy past.
"Jiminy Cricket.
Bug, boulevardier, flaneur, man of leisure."
He opens the film by singing the classic "When You Wish Upon a Star" from the 1940 animated
Pinocchio.
But 21st century Jiminy delivers the song with a wry wink.
He knows he and his song are known all over the world.
He goes on to explain that he's in the now, telling the story of Pinocchio and Geppetto
as if it happened in the distant past.
"Hm.
Some storyteller you are."
Seeing as how Pinocchio takes place in the 1800s, this makes Jiminy well over 200 years
old.
He's lived a long life with many chapters, including the one where he drifted into an
Italian village and got a job from a Blue Fairy.
She appoints him Pinocchio's conscience, due to proximity more than any sort of moral authority.
If anything, he's a risky choice as the story's ethical compass.
"I'm not a conscience.
I'm a cricket.
More of an insect than an instinct."
This Cricket might be kind of a weirdo.
At the mention of Geppetto's selling of "oddments," he saucily quips,
"Sounds like my kind of place."
In other words, this cricket is a little sus.
The Blue Fairy assumes Jiminy Cricket knows how to be the boy's "conscience."
Whether he does or not, he never provides much guidance or assistance other than vague
worry.
When he even bothers to hang around, that is.
He offers platitudes about life in the form of sarcastic observations about the events
of the movie as they unfold.
These gags are less for his wooden charge than for the audience.
Attentive older viewers will hear the social commentary between Jiminy's lines.
For a movie made by entertainment behemoth Disney, the sassy Cricket's comments have
a distinct anti-Hollywood bent.
After hearing Pinocchio excitedly tell him about his Honest John, purportedly a talent
agent who can make the kid famous, Jiminy observes,
"Honest John?
Pinokes, as a rule of thumb, when somebody calls themselves 'honest,' they ain't.
Especially if they're an agent."
Honest John dishes out plenty of anti-corporate sentiment himself.
He remarks that Pinocchio won't have to worry about much of anything when he's famous, particularly
taxes.
And then there's the Hollywood in-joke in the scene where Honest John and Pinocchio
meet.
He only entertains the notion of being an actor because Jiminy Cricket — his conscience
— isn't around to tell him it's a bad idea.
The natures and abilities of animals in 2022's Pinocchio remake may puzzle older viewers,
should they think too hard about it.
The rules of the world in which the movie is set are inconsistent with regard to who
can think and speak, and who can't.
There's obviously a supernatural element at play, as Pinocchio is transformed from inanimate
to walking-and-talking wood through the actions of a Cynthia Erivo-sized fairy.
But there's no explanation for why some animals talk while others just meow.
Jiminy Cricket is a bug who speaks and is so trusted that he's tasked with serving as
a conscience.
Honest John is a fox the size of a small person.
He talks, but he's nasty and immoral.
Sofia the seagull speaks, but only to other animals, while Geppetto's two pets, Figaro
the cat and Cleo the goldfish, never pipe up.
Maybe pets don't talk and wild, independent animals do?
Except Monstro, the whale that swallows Geppetto, Pinocchio, and the pets, never utters a word.
Lots of big franchise-type family movies are seeded with references to familiar pop culture
artifacts of the past.
The 2022 live-action remake of Disney's Pinocchio is no exception, offering plenty of Easter
eggs to viewers who pay close attention.
An establishing shot of Geppetto's workshop shows the audience a wall hung with dozens
of clocks of the cuckoo, novelty, noisy, and mechanical varieties.
While they're only visible for a few frames, many of those timepieces are Disney-branded
items.
Among the classic characters that make an appearance on Geppetto's clocks are Princess
Aurora from Sleeping Beauty, Donald Duck, Woody from Toy Story, and Roger and Jessica
Rabbit from the Disney-adjacent Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
The director of the latter happens to be Robert Zemeckis, who coincidentally happens to have
directed this very Pinocchio movie.
He also co-wrote and helmed the 1985 sci-fi comedy Back to the Future.
This wall of clocks sure feels like a reference to Zemeckis' breakthrough film.
The iconic time-travel movie opens with the camera taking in a bunch of time-telling devices.