Pinocchini

45 minutes into Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio on Netflix and also Robert Zemeckis's Disney's Pinocchio on Disney+ and there are truly a bizarre amount of parallelisms, such that one who had never read the original book would think maybe the original book started out as a sort of The Hidden Fortress thing revolving around the cricket the way Star Wars starts out following the droids, and Geppetto really did construct the puppet as a replacement for his deceased son, and it was a deliberate act on Pinocchio's part to join the puppet show for fortune and glory rather than go to school and learn his letters and make his papa proud- but like, lol nope, these are all creative liberties that both adaptations took with the story completely independently for some reason. 

The Cricket appears in like two scenes in the original book (dies in the first scene he's in; second time shows up as a ghost); I don't recall Geppetto having ever had a family, and the log was already alive when he started carving it; Pinocchio gets distracted on his way to school, the price of admission to see the show happens to be as much as he can sell his letter book for, and he gets shanghai'd into being part of the show from there when the stringed marionettes who are apparently fully sapient notice him in the audience and call attention to his presence. It's weird?

Go read the original book, is my point. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. It's bug wild, it's a relatively brief read, and it's in the public domain. K.C. "This is fine" Green has a fully faithful webcomic adaptation here if that's more your speed, which I never pass up the opportunity to plug, but like. Seriously what a wonderful book.

From what I've seen so far the Netflix one, well obviously seeing how it's based on the book and not an intermediary adaptation, does have some- some!- of the weirder stuff from the original book, but the Zemeckis one is plenty weird as well for, Zemeckis reasons, and Disney live-action-remake reasons. Probably not worth watching on its own terms, but that's par for the course on Disney remakes; their watchability is reliant on intertextuality. I happen to be on both a Zemeckis kick and a Joseph Gordon-Levitt kick (voices Jiminy in this one, allegedly) so I decided to check it out, and, well I'm fascinated by these very specific adaptational choices, among other things, so I'm not regretting this time, even though it's clear that Del Toro has a lot more on his mind in his telling of the tale.

An hour into both, now, and the parallelisms are drifting apart now, but we'll see if Guillermo Del Toro gets interested in Pleasure Island any time soon (it doesn't show up in the book until near the end, so probably not...)