We watched Glass Onion last night, with the timing being such that we finished at midnight, so I didn't have time to make my Christmas Radio pt 2 post. I'll fill that in later as well.
Anyway I finished both of this year's Pinocchio movies today (Pinocchio: a True Story also came out this year, but it is based rather around The Golden Key, a Russian children's novel (admittedly inspired by Pinocchio's) in actuality a different story and here named after Pinocchio instead of Buratino for the brand recognition (I still want to see it?)) and anyway I have Thoughts. Most of them having to do with The Land of Toys/Toyland/Pleasure Island (Paese dei Balocchi: Paese is ambiguously sized in Italian, could mean country, village, land...; Balocchi is one of the words meaning toy or plaything. Translated as the "Country of Playthings" by Walter Samuel Cramp, "Land of Boobies" by Mary Alice Murray, "Playtime Land" by Joseph Walker...)
No Land of Toys in GUILLERMO DEL TORO'S PINOCCHIO but fascist child-soldier boot camp, which I am not equipped to unpack, although unpacking that would doubtless be quite fruitful. Gas masks as donkey faces, I... Anyway, since most of my thoughts have to do with Pleasure Island in these adaptations, that means I actually don't have much to say about the Netflix movie, and will mostly be talking about the Disney one? And a few other adaptations I can read the Disney one against.
Pleasure Island in Disney's PINOCCHIO is Zemeckis at his Zemeckisiest, an increasingly nightmarish thrillride, a corrupted version of the whimsical occasionally-literal roller coasters of the Polar Express, whose more frightening aspects are tempered by this strangely literalizing grounding force? There's a room Lampwick and Pinoke are conveyed through full of clocks being smashed without any seeming symbolism behind it, children would want to smash timepieces because children apparently find destroying clockwork fun, but the clocks may or may not have been manufactured by Geppetto and Pinoke, um, clocks this, but there's no room for that to breathe symbolically either because of the frequency with which they bring that up.
The Land of Toys in Matteo Garrone's 2019 Pinocchio was, I'm not sure if I posted about this at the time but wanted to bring up now in conversation with the Zemeckis imagining, but, really tangible, I mean, you could tell it was a big set somewhere, an actual old fairground or converted barn or something. And pretty quaint by today's standards but in a way that's probably the point, having little slides around and everything would probably have been mindblowing to children from the 19th century Italian countryside.
The donkey transformation in Roberto Bernini's 2002 Pinocchio is the most effective of any I've seen. It shows just enough that you're not sure how much it actually shows and how much you're imagining. The 1940 Disney version is also of course effectively nightmarish, let's dub that a close second. Zemeckis's version is surprisingly close to the 1940 transformation, sans the smoking and alcohol in that scene- it's not really scary, but it's not not-scary. Until the 2D animation of the shadow showing Lampwick's final bit of morphic, which is really floaty with its implied volume (I suspect they're going from 2D silhouettes and morphing by mapping individual lines from their places on one model to the next?)
The carriage driver in the Zemeckis Pinocchio is played by Luke Evans and they manage to make it work super well, like, super well? Fox and Cat were aligned with the character in Pinocchio 1940 but they're not here so they just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth I guess.
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