The Movie Thread Reloaded

[Bruwulf]

I figure Jurassic Whatever will eventually be rebranded to Jurassic Space! Then Jurassic Galaxy!

I mean...

Yeah, okay.

[Omega]

Jurassic World: Dominion was the #2 movie in the world and made over a billion dollars (one of only two films to do that this year). The franchise is a long way from being dead.

They sure are hellbent on killing it. Former wotc employees?

[Stephen Tannhauser]

Watched Guillermo del Toro's, sorry, that should be Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio on Netflix tonight, and wishing I could go back to the halcyon days of my youth when I could avoid ruining movies by having to think about what they meant.

Visually, musically and emotionally the thing is utterly spectacular. Philosophically and thematically, it's something of a letdown because del Toro makes the mistake a lot of auteurs make when they decide they want to do their own version of a story: in order to harp on their own preferred message, they change the point of the story so drastically that it really feels like it should just have been a different and original story.

Further discussion is going to involve a lot of spoilers, so last warning here for people who still want to see it to drop out.

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Del Toro's favourite story moral, which you can see in several of his most well-known movies (The Shape of Water most blatantly) is, as he admits in the commentary special, "I am always interested in the outsider ... I thought it was really important to show that you shouldn't have to change to be accepted for who you are." Which manifests, in this film, in the most egregious misunderstanding of the "Pinocchio" story I've ever seen: In this film, Pinocchio does not become a real living human boy at the end of the story in return for learning and practicing good behaviour; instead, he is wished back to life, still as a puppet, by Sebastian the cricket (thus completely obviating the warning Death gives Pinocchio earlier in the film about life being precious because of its brevity and inevitable ending). The biggest arc of moral growth in the film, by contrast, belongs to Geppetto: In this version, Geppetto carved Pinocchio not out of altruistic intent to make a toy children will love (and maybe a little wistful longing for a child he never had), but in a drunken stupor of grief and anger as a replacement for a son lost in an accidental wartime bombing. It ultimately transpires that Geppetto's job is not to teach Pinocchio to be brave, honest and true like Carlo was, but to learn not to try to turn Pinocchio into a copy of Carlo, and to love Pinocchio for who he is. And Pleasure Island, the place where Pinocchio learns the moral danger of running wild and acting like a selfish animal concerned only with your own wants and pleasures, is replaced with a fascist youth training camp (this version of the story being set during Mussolini's rule in WW2) where Pinocchio -- drafted as a potentially immortal and therefore invaluable soldier -- learns the moral danger of mindless obedience and conformity to what leader figures tell you is "good" and "right".

In and of itself I have no problem with the message that it's good to learn to love someone for who they are, regardless of what they may happen to be, or with the message that blind obedience to authority isn't always the right thing ... but those messages are not the Pinocchio story. Pinocchio's story has always, from the beginning, been about how becoming a morally better person is a radical transformation; being accepted as who you are is one thing, but the entire point of Pinocchio being a wooden puppet -- a false imitation of a person -- is that it takes immense effort for him to change and learn and grow, and to understand why the difference between truth and lies, between reality and imitation, matters; that to do those things is the essence of being human and real, and that failure will keep him stuck forever as he is, an ersatz imitation of a human being that will forever fall short of real life. (In the denouement, the film even explicitly depicts Pinocchio inevitably losing all his friends and loved ones to death while he, an immortal puppet, goes on, virtually unchanging, and somehow del Toro wants us to forget the warning of his own Death character and somehow think this is a happy ending?) The trope of redemptive transformation is so utterly fundamental to the Pinocchio character and story arc that if it's abandoned, I honestly think there's no point in keeping the outer trappings that del Toro has such fun reimagining.

Now all that said, as noted before, if all you want is a fantastically depicted stop-motion animation tale with a lot of great music, visuals and performances, this film will not disappoint. But while this thing is less Woke than some modern reimaginings of other stories, there is still a fatal Woke philosophy at the heart of it: It's the world's duty to accept you for who you are despite your differences, even to the extent of simply pretending those differences don't exist if necessary; it's not your duty to learn and grow to become a different and better person, because ultimately that's neither possible nor desirable. In the end, seeing that message ruined it for me.

[hedgehobbit]

in order to harp on their own preferred message, they change the point of the story so drastically that it really feels like it should just have been a different and original story.

Thanks for the heads up. I was thinking of watching this with my kids.

[Stephen Tannhauser]

Thanks for the heads up. I was thinking of watching this with my kids.

Yeah, it's not really a kids' movie in the final analysis, animation and music notwithstanding. Even those kids with the maturity level to handle its content would not, I think, take away the best message from it.

[jhkim]

In and of itself I have no problem with the message that it's good to learn to love someone for who they are, regardless of what they may happen to be, or with the message that blind obedience to authority isn't always the right thing ... but those messages are not the Pinocchio story. Pinocchio's story has always, from the beginning, been about how becoming a morally better person is a radical transformation; being accepted as who you are is one thing, but the entire point of Pinocchio being a wooden puppet -- a false imitation of a person -- is that it takes immense effort for him to change and learn and grow, and to understand why the difference between truth and lies, between reality and imitation, matters; that to do those things is the essence of being human and real, and that failure will keep him stuck forever as he is, an ersatz imitation of a human being that will forever fall short of real life.

I haven't seen the film, but nearly all modern adaptations of old children's stories have huge changes from the original. I think particularly of MGM's 1939 The Wizard of Oz movie that completely reversed the original story, turning Dorothy into a petulant teen who needs to be taught a lesson, instead of a sweet young girl who teaches those around her.

I don't doubt that the film similarly has major changes to the original. Still, I question your interpretation of the original as well. You say that being a puppet is at the core of Pinocchio -- but in the story, Pinocchio didn't start out as a puppet. He was a talking piece of wood who caused trouble even before he was made into a puppet, and he even fought with angry Geppetto over how he was carved. It's been ages since I've read the story, and I don't think I have a simple summary of the meaning - but I think Geppetto's fits of rage are an important part of it.

[Stephen Tannhauser]

Pinocchio didn't start out as a puppet. He was a talking piece of wood who caused trouble even before he was made into a puppet, and he even fought with angry Geppetto over how he was carved. It's been ages since I've read the story, and I don't think I have a simple summary of the meaning - but I think Geppetto's fits of rage are an important part of it.

And in the very first version of Collodi's story, as it was serialized in a magazine, Pinocchio was actually hung and executed for his crimes at the end of Chapter 15, which Collodi intended to be the tragic cautionary finale of the tale. It was his editor who encouraged him to find a way to end the story more suitable to the intended audience of children, and by the time it was published in full and completely as a novel the ending where Pinocchio becomes a better person and a real boy was in place. The death-metamorphosis-rebirth progression is fundamental to the story, and has been in practically every version since.

The one major exception to this before del Toro's film (and I find it a telling one) was the 1936 Russian adaptation The Adventures of Buratino, by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy; Tolstoy's version celebrated the defiant behaviour of Buratino (the Pinocchio expy) as exactly the kind of refusal to conform to bourgeois morality that Soviet children were supposed to find admirable, and as a result he didn't transform into a human at the end because he wasn't the one that needed to change. The philosophical congruence between that message and del Toro's is, I think, a little too acute to be coincidental.

[jhkim]

Pinocchio didn't start out as a puppet. He was a talking piece of wood who caused trouble even before he was made into a puppet, and he even fought with angry Geppetto over how he was carved. It's been ages since I've read the story, and I don't think I have a simple summary of the meaning - but I think Geppetto's fits of rage are an important part of it.

And in the very first version of Collodi's story, as it was serialized in a magazine, Pinocchio was actually hung and executed for his crimes at the end of Chapter 15, which Collodi intended to be the tragic cautionary finale of the tale. It was his editor who encouraged him to find a way to end the story more suitable to the intended audience of children, and by the time it was published in full and completely as a novel the ending where Pinocchio becomes a better person and a real boy was in place. The death-metamorphosis-rebirth progression is fundamental to the story, and has been in practically every version since.

I've only read the original and seen the 1940 Disney cartoon, so I only have two data points here. I'd agree that metamorphosis/rebirth is kept in the Disney cartoon, but it changes some other major fundamentals. Especially:

1) In the story, Pinocchio is alive and speaks even before he is carved - and he is violent and mischievous from the start. In the cartoon, he is given life by a blue fairy as Gepetto's wish, and is an innocent led astray by temptation.

2) In the story, Gepetto is an angry, violent man who originally wants a talking puppet to make money. In the cartoon, he is a kindly old man who wishes for a son.

I think these amount to a fundamental change of the meaning. Yes, Pinocchio transforms - but the cartoon rewrites Gepetto and invents the Blue Fairy as the good establishment who don't change, which Pinocchio needs to conform to. Also, the tone is very different - and events like when Pinocchio kills the talking cricket with a hammer would be shocking to those only familiar with the cartoon.

In general, I understand getting annoyed when a movie fundamentally changes the story of the book. It has sometimes bugged me in other movie adaptations. But it is also hugely common especially in children's movies, and sometimes if I let go of my expectations from the book, there are a lot of good movies that don't adhere to the book they're based on.

The one major exception to this before del Toro's film (and I find it a telling one) was the 1936 Russian adaptation The Adventures of Buratino, by Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy; Tolstoy's version celebrated the defiant behaviour of Buratino (the Pinocchio expy) as exactly the kind of refusal to conform to bourgeois morality that Soviet children were supposed to find admirable, and as a result he didn't transform into a human at the end because he wasn't the one that needed to change. The philosophical congruence between that message and del Toro's is, I think, a little too acute to be coincidental.

I haven't seen either del Toro's film or Tolstoy's, so I don't have any strong opinion on this. From the sound of it, the common factor is that they are anti-establishment.

By contrast, Disney is pro-establishment. So Disney fundamentally changed the story to where the father-figure is a kindly good man helped by a purely good fairy - and things like going to school and doing what your parents tell you are unquestionably good. A Soviet film from much later decades might also be more pro-establishment like Disney, just changed to favor the communist establishment.

[Thornhammer]

Watching the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers movie from earlier this year.

Sort of a modern-day version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it is cartoons and humans living and working together. Chip and Dale have fallen on hard times after the show ended, trying to rescue Monterey Jack who got in over his head buying cheese from criminals. Dale got CGI upgrade surgery to try and bring his career back.

...it is fucking crazy. Zipper has been pounding Gadget and they have a great many children, with the results one might expect from a fly and a mouse.

Far better than I expected. They know what they're doing and lean into it. Roger Rabbit shows up.

[Ratman_tf]

Watching the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers movie from earlier this year.

Sort of a modern-day version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it is cartoons and humans living and working together. Chip and Dale have fallen on hard times after the show ended, trying to rescue Monterey Jack who got in over his head buying cheese from criminals. Dale got CGI upgrade surgery to try and bring his career back.

...it is fucking crazy. Zipper has been pounding Gadget and they have a great many children, with the results one might expect from a fly and a mouse.

You have got to be fucking shitting me.

[Omega]

Watching the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers movie from earlier this year.

Sort of a modern-day version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it is cartoons and humans living and working together. Chip and Dale have fallen on hard times after the show ended, trying to rescue Monterey Jack who got in over his head buying cheese from criminals. Dale got CGI upgrade surgery to try and bring his career back.

...it is fucking crazy. Zipper has been pounding Gadget and they have a great many children, with the results one might expect from a fly and a mouse.

You have got to be fucking shitting me.

No. Hes not. It really is that fucking trash.

[Trond]

Watched Guillermo del Toro's, sorry, that should be Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio on Netflix tonight, and wishing I could go back to the halcyon days of my youth when I could avoid ruining movies by having to think about what they meant.

Visually, musically and emotionally the thing is utterly spectacular. Philosophically and thematically, it's something of a letdown because del Toro makes the mistake a lot of auteurs make when they decide they want to do their own version of a story: in order to harp on their own preferred message, they change the point of the story so drastically that it really feels like it should just have been a different and original story.

Further discussion is going to involve a lot of spoilers, so last warning here for people who still want to see it to drop out.

S
P
O
I
L
E
R
S

Del Toro's favourite story moral, which you can see in several of his most well-known movies (The Shape of Water most blatantly) is, as he admits in the commentary special, "I am always interested in the outsider ... I thought it was really important to show that you shouldn't have to change to be accepted for who you are." Which manifests, in this film, in the most egregious misunderstanding of the "Pinocchio" story I've ever seen: In this film, Pinocchio does not become a real living human boy at the end of the story in return for learning and practicing good behaviour; instead, he is wished back to life, still as a puppet, by Sebastian the cricket (thus completely obviating the warning Death gives Pinocchio earlier in the film about life being precious because of its brevity and inevitable ending). The biggest arc of moral growth in the film, by contrast, belongs to Geppetto: In this version, Geppetto carved Pinocchio not out of altruistic intent to make a toy children will love (and maybe a little wistful longing for a child he never had), but in a drunken stupor of grief and anger as a replacement for a son lost in an accidental wartime bombing. It ultimately transpires that Geppetto's job is not to teach Pinocchio to be brave, honest and true like Carlo was, but to learn not to try to turn Pinocchio into a copy of Carlo, and to love Pinocchio for who he is. And Pleasure Island, the place where Pinocchio learns the moral danger of running wild and acting like a selfish animal concerned only with your own wants and pleasures, is replaced with a fascist youth training camp (this version of the story being set during Mussolini's rule in WW2) where Pinocchio -- drafted as a potentially immortal and therefore invaluable soldier -- learns the moral danger of mindless obedience and conformity to what leader figures tell you is "good" and "right".

In and of itself I have no problem with the message that it's good to learn to love someone for who they are, regardless of what they may happen to be, or with the message that blind obedience to authority isn't always the right thing ... but those messages are not the Pinocchio story. Pinocchio's story has always, from the beginning, been about how becoming a morally better person is a radical transformation; being accepted as who you are is one thing, but the entire point of Pinocchio being a wooden puppet -- a false imitation of a person -- is that it takes immense effort for him to change and learn and grow, and to understand why the difference between truth and lies, between reality and imitation, matters; that to do those things is the essence of being human and real, and that failure will keep him stuck forever as he is, an ersatz imitation of a human being that will forever fall short of real life. (In the denouement, the film even explicitly depicts Pinocchio inevitably losing all his friends and loved ones to death while he, an immortal puppet, goes on, virtually unchanging, and somehow del Toro wants us to forget the warning of his own Death character and somehow think this is a happy ending?) The trope of redemptive transformation is so utterly fundamental to the Pinocchio character and story arc that if it's abandoned, I honestly think there's no point in keeping the outer trappings that del Toro has such fun reimagining.

Now all that said, as noted before, if all you want is a fantastically depicted stop-motion animation tale with a lot of great music, visuals and performances, this film will not disappoint. But while this thing is less Woke than some modern reimaginings of other stories, there is still a fatal Woke philosophy at the heart of it: It's the world's duty to accept you for who you are despite your differences, even to the extent of simply pretending those differences don't exist if necessary; it's not your duty to learn and grow to become a different and better person, because ultimately that's neither possible nor desirable. In the end, seeing that message ruined it for me.

Thanks for the review. That last paragraph of yours is pretty much right on target as far as my own observations of not only wokeness but also Del Toro. Seriously in Shape of Water we're expected to root for the person who has sex with a creature who seems to have the intelligence of a chimpanzee, while the family man is of course evil. If it were a man masturbating in the bathtub at the beginning and later humping the creature from the black lagoon I don't think he would have expected us to react the same way.

[Ghostmaker]

Watching the Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers movie from earlier this year.

Sort of a modern-day version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, it is cartoons and humans living and working together. Chip and Dale have fallen on hard times after the show ended, trying to rescue Monterey Jack who got in over his head buying cheese from criminals. Dale got CGI upgrade surgery to try and bring his career back.

...it is fucking crazy. Zipper has been pounding Gadget and they have a great many children, with the results one might expect from a fly and a mouse.

Far better than I expected. They know what they're doing and lean into it. Roger Rabbit shows up.

This sounds like the sort of thing that'd be hilarious to watch with a few beers.

[Thornhammer]

This sounds like the sort of thing that'd be hilarious to watch with a few beers.

"A couple of margaritas in" certainly helped.

[Ratman_tf]

This sounds like the sort of thing that'd be hilarious to watch with a few beers.

"A couple of margaritas in" certainly helped.

The reviews I read after hearing about that bit seem to indicate that the whole thing is taking the piss on the TV show, being set "outside" with the characters being animated actors like in Roger Rabbit.