Disney can always turn an eye to its vast library of classics and the official trailer for Pinocchio proves it with the first look at a man as timeless as the story itself, Tom Hanks, playing Geppetto in a new live-action take that will be heading to Disney Plus in early September.
Unlike many of the company’s recent films, such as West Side Story or any of the Marvel Studios productions, Pinocchio wasn’t among the movies to suffer delays due to the pandemic with famed director Robert Zemeckis being confirmed in his duties in early 2020. Pinocchio was filmed in the spring of 2021, with actors Cynthia Erivo (The Blue Fairy) and Luke Evans (The Coachman) playing the other two live-action parts next to Hanks’; while 13-year-old Benjamin Evan Ainsworth (Pinocchio), Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jiminy Cricket), Keegan-Michael Key (the Fox) and Lorraine Bracco (Sophia the Seagull) round off the rest of the voice casting.
The trailer for Pinocchio is just over a minute and a half long mostly featuring Geppetto in his workshop tinkering with one of the many toys and marionettes that ends up becoming his son, Pinocchio, after magically being granted a wish by a star to bring the wooden boy to life in all the glory of his classic 1940 design. Speaking of which, a new version of the classic Disney song “Wish Upon a Star” performed by Erivo is heard in the trailer that confirms Pinocchio will be a Disney Plus exclusive premiering on September 8, 2022.
Pinocchio’s story is based on the classic children’s book written by Italian author Carlo Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio. Like so many other literary gems, it has been praised for the way it uses metaphor to analyze fatherhood and the human condition in an authentic hero’s journey. Suffice to say, this is far from the only Pinocchio production available since, even beyond Disney’s first animated film, an Italian live-action version of Pinocchio starring Roberto Benigni (Life is Beautiful) came out recently to much critical praise in 2019.
As if that wasn’t enough, another similarly accomplished director, Guillermo del Toro, is working on his own Pinocchio adaptation, in this case, an animated one for Netflix (Del Toro’s first film of this kind) with an even more star-studded cast featuring the likes of Ewan McGregor, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, Ron Perlman, and David Bradley. Unlike Del Toro, Zemeckis is no stranger to working with animation and motion capture techniques to great success, such as in The Polar Express, but when it comes to streaming he’s had worse luck as seen with the critically panned The Witches where he coincidentally worked with Del Toro.
Despite the massive success Disney has seen with its previous live-action remakes of classic such as The Lion King, The Beauty and the Beast, or Aladdin, the decision to release Pinocchio as a streaming exclusive as the company seeks to add further appeal and value to is platform while Netflix is struggling.
Pinocchio will be available exclusively on Disney Plus starting September 8, 2022.