The first trailer for Disney’s live-action remake of Pinocchio indicates that the movie will manage to avoid one big mistake that has afflicted other live-action Disney movie remakes. With the movie not set to be released until September 8, 2022, there still isn’t a lot of information on it, and it could still easily fall into a lot of the same pitfalls as its contemporaries. However, there’s at least one area that Pinocchio is succeeding in that other live-action Disney movie remakes have failed in more times than not.
Among the many criticisms that have been levied at The Lion King, that adherence to realism came at the price of robbing the movie of all of the charm and whimsy that attracted people to the original.
The need to make everything look realistic has been nothing but a hindrance to Disney’s live-action remakes, but Pinocchio doesn’t seem to be having this problem. Based on the first trailer, not only does Pinocchio retain his exact look from the original movie, but Jiminy Cricket is shown to still look cartoonish, and while Honest John and Gideon look like a real fox and cat, it’s nowhere near to the extent as other live-action remakes. All of this suggests that Disney's live-action Pinocchio will be preserving some of the cartoony elements of the original movie instead of sacrificing them for realism, and that already puts it above many of its predecessors.
That sort of approach would definitely benefit a movie like Pinocchio since the original movie is one with a wide variety of cartoonish elements. In addition to what’s already been mentioned, there are things like the kids turning into donkeys on Pleasure Island, the fight with Monstro at the end of the movie, and, of course, Pinocchio’s nose stretching whenever he lies. All of those iconic scenes and more would have looked unsettling if the movie went with a more realistic approach, so this allows for them to be redone without losing what made the original ones work on a visual level.
An overreliance on realism has been a major flaw in Disney’s live-action movie remakes, but based on its first trailer, Pinocchio won’t be having that problem. Between the appearance of the titular character and how various other characters look, it seems that Pinocchio will be making more of an effort to retain the cartoonish elements of the original movie than its contemporaries. At the moment, there isn’t much of anything known about the movie, so it could easily still fall into the other pitfalls of live-action remakes, but at the very least, it will be able to have such a crucial element to its advantage.
