It was a typical Sunday at the Serrels. Mid-morning, on the couch. Cereal bowl in one hand, spoon in the other. flourished mode pajama. The perfect time to watch a movie.
My 9 year old son grabbed the remote. ignited the old Disney+ and started scrolling. He lands on Pinocchio.
Pas le Pinocchio arose in 1940, oh no.
Not the film critic Leonard Maltin called the “peak” of animation. It’s not the movie that regularly makes it into the top 10 of “greatest movies ever made” lists.
The Little Mermaid will hit theaters in May 2023.
Disney
No, my son wanted to watch the new Pinocchio. The live-action remake is currently front and center on the Disney Plus homepage. The Pinocchio that skipped theaters and went straight to streaming. The Pinocchio is currently sitting at a global rate of 22% on Rotten Tomatoes. He wanted the real Pinocchio.
With the energy of a raging raging boomer, I made quite a fuss. It was a remake, I have explained. What’s more, a soulless remake. It should look like the original, the beautifully hand-animated masterpiece. The timeless, perfectly crafted morality tale.
“No,” he replied, with dead, crushed insects for eyeballs. “I want to watch the Nouveau Pinochio.”
He didn’t even pronounce it correctly. He kept saying “pee-noach-ee-oh”.
My friends, we live in dark times. Disney is working on its catalog of animated classics, stealing their souls one by one like a content-producing, AI-powered grim reaper. There was The Lion King, a movie so bad that I can only assume it was bad on purpose. Then there was That’s why. A movie that felt like a two-hour trailer for a movie that was also, sort of, two hours long.
Even Disney’s live-action movies that somehow span from “god awful” to “barely mediocre” are still damn bad. The beauty and the Beast. OK I guess. Aladdin is arguably the best, but it’s still Absolutely not good. Especially compared to the source material, each of which is a classic in its own right, for unique reasons. Mulan, stimulating and charming; Aladdin, loud and seductive; The Lion King; classic and epic.
Each of them reduced, essentially, to mud. Films that draw from the same palette. Films that look, sound alike, and are, at best, conveyor belt products designed to generate revenue in the safest and most efficient way possible.
But the process works. This is the problem. It works a little too well. Children, who have tiny caterpillars for brains, are pre-programmed to taste terrible. Left to their own devices, they’ll consume sugar, Roblox, and endless episodes of Booba until you are clean to enjoy the things that are Actually good. Even my own flesh and blood broke my heart, telling me that the old Lion King “sucked” and the new one was “much better.”
The Lion King is perhaps my least favorite “live-action” remake. It is saying something.
Disney
Getting kids to watch an older classic when a newer version of that movie exists is next to impossible. I couldn’t convince my son to watch the original Pinocchio, and I guess that story plays out the same all over the world. Kids don’t want to eat broccoli, they want nuggets. And in that sense, the very fact of constantly remaking these films erases their legacy for a whole new generation of children. Generations of children have come to love films like Pinocchio and Snow White and The Jungle Book. This collective cultural language is under attack by these completely bizarre “live action” remakes, and it sucks.
Adults are also to blame. Driven by curiosity and nostalgia, we just can’t help it. I will absolutely watch the new Little Mermaid. Guy Ritchie directs a remake of Hercules. You think I won’t go watch this? Of course I am! I am an idiot! We are all.
We’re like the cars lining up to see Kevin Costner’s baseball field at the end of Field of Dreams. A Pavlovian response that no one can quite explain. Free will does not exist.
If Disney builds it, we’ll come.
We will come for reasons we don’t quite understand. We will arrive without knowing why we are doing it. We will arrive as innocent as children, nostalgic for the past. We’ll spend the money without even thinking about it. Because it is the money that we have and the peace that we lack.
And shit. I will be on the front line. I just know it.
