EXCLUSIVE: Leaked Disney memo apologizes for appalling 'Pinocchio'
Disney
MICKEY-LEVEL CLEARANCE ONLY–NOT APPROVED FOR DISNEY+ SUBSCRIBERS
Dear horrified investors and staff,
Upon further reflection, perhaps puppet boy kidnapping and child/donkey trafficking don’t seem as, er, family friendly (?) in live-action as they do in animation. We now realize that crickets are not cute, and allowing Robert Zemeckis–who we totally forgot was supposed to be banned from CGI after “The Polar Express”–to engineer a realistic cricket resulted in Jiminy appearing to be wearing another cricket’s face as a mask. We didn’t understand when the director–who made “Back to the Future” and “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Forrest Gump” and gets a free pass for life, right? No?–told Joseph Gordon-Levitt (“The Walk”), as the voice of Jiminy, to be super-weird, inconsistent and goofy but never warm or endearing. That, too, may have been a bad choice.
On that note, the following decisions may also have been unwise:
Casting, despite the auditions of many older Italian actors, Tom Hanks as the world’s least Italian Italian clockmaker Geppetto. The movie’s clearly set before the Italian language or credible accents existed! Plus, the original “Pinocchio” (also based on a book from 1883) is kinda like “Big,” what with the young kid thrust into a more grown-up situation and the parent having no idea where he is, and we figured Tom Hanks is the epitome of greatness! Yes, we just saw “Elvis,” and again, so sorry.
Allowing Zemeckis, also a co-writer here, to indicate that Geppetto wants the wooden Pinocchio to become real because of the apparent loss of his own son. Whoever said it would just invite questions about what happened to the boy and the boy’s mother (and when?) and Geppetto’s ability to parent at his age and why Geppetto’s answer to this situation was “Wishing on a star to turn a puppet into a living thing” was onto something. We do realize “whoever” may have been “everybody,” and that assuming we’d be less creepy than “The Odd Life of Timothy Green” was not, in fact, a sure thing.
Forgetting about “Toy Story” and the toys coming to life there and that the notion of Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) becoming a “real boy” now just makes you wonder if Woody is a real boy and what is a real boy and why the 97-hour-minute “Pinocchio” claims to be about what you have to do to be a real boy while existing completely outside of any reality. (And is all this different than being a real girl? We don’t even know what we mean by this!) You know, except for real things like nefarious child traffickers and massively traumatic experiences, which don’t seem to have any real impact on Pinocchio at all!
Skipping the design review meeting and now seeing that most of the effects may have been done in 2006 and every character looks created by a different studio. The scene when Cynthia Erivo, singing “When You Wish Upon a Star” as the Blue Fairy just a few feet from Jiminy and the suddenly alive Pinocchio very much does not look like these three beings exist in the same universe. If we can just put a shrug emoji on that one and move on, we’d appreciate it.
Really not thinking, honestly, about all that business about conscience or whatever. The 1940 movie still seems lovely, in a really bizarre kind of way, with its talk about being brave and truthful and unselfish. Seems like a good message, you know? Did we consider that the new “Pinocchio” would operate on such an odd emotional register and seem like a fantasy for bad parents who teach their children nothing and narrowly avoid tragedy but without any effects on the kid? Or the suggestion that the world is a terrible place and kids shouldn’t leave their families and opportunities are inherently selfish affronts to parents? Or that the meaning of “good” is subjective and the idea of Jiminy as Pinocchio’s conscience now feels ridiculous, forcing the “boy” to trust input from a cricket assigned by a fairy when the whole point of a conscience is that it comes from within? We did not.
Avoiding the concept of who a movie is “for” and who might “like it” or “want it” or “be able to endure it.” No, this thing isn’t for kids or adults or any of the eight test audiences of squirrels. Somewhere, sometime, something will accidentally put on “Pinocchio” and not throw up. In theory.
Not actually “reading” the “script” and therefore neglecting to question the awkward lunges at timeliness as Honest John (Keegan-Michael Key) endorses becoming an influencer (and accidentally reviews the movie by saying, “This is an outrage! An atrocity!”), and Pinocchio literally says, “I don’t need to go to school; I’m going to be famous instead, and that will make father proud.” Meanwhile the movie remains set in the distant past and disinterested in anything resembling the actual, current challenges of being a–cough–real kid.
Oh, yeah, the Pleasure Island sequence. No, we don’t think that having fun and having a conscience are mutually exclusive. Applying shame to attendance at an entertainment plaza may be off-brand for us. We agree that the disturbing plot is the stuff of nightmares in the animated version and maybe someone watching the 2022 version would be terrified or confused or definitely both, but have you seen plans for our all-new attractions at the real, soon-to-reopen Pleasure Island in Orlando, Florida? They’ll bring out the donkey in you! (Slogan not finalized.)
The concept of honesty, too, seemed good on the surface, considering (gestures broadly at the last few years). But does the incredibly hollow message justify the phallic nature of the continually extending nose? Fortunately this is the first time any of our movies have put questionably sexual things in a kids’ property.
You saw all those Disney-referencing clocks that Geppetto made, didn’t you? “Snow White” and “Dumbo” and “Toy Story” and “Lion King”? And we also kept the strange spanking clock from the original movie too! What more do you people want?
We remind you that this memo is private, as we continue to have a very good sense of what the public needs. Specifically, Robert Zemeckis’ highly anticipated, all-motion-capture “Back to the Future”/“Forrest Gump” mashup sequel “Back to the Fourrest,” in which Gump joins Marty McFly on a time traveling adventure to stop us from making the movie. With Marty now played by Josh Gad!
P.S. We should note that after trying these live-action remakes for a while now, the time may have come to reconsider the previous goal of having kids watch our movies and say, “That was sweet” or “I learned something.” At our next meeting, we will vote on the new tagline: “Disney: What the Shit Was That?”
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