The animated Disney classic Stanley Kubrick dreamed of remaking: “It would be nice”
The biggest and most obvious danger in putting a fresh twist on a classic is that it’ll always be held up against the definitive version for comparison, and very rarely does it come close. However, as one of the greatest directors of all time, you’d fancy Stanley Kubrick to pull it off.
Admittedly, his name doesn’t immediately conjure images of Disney’s family-friendly output, with Kubrick famed for his innovative, meticulous, and painstakingly crafted features, several of which will endure for as long as the moving image exists as some of the medium’s ultimate masterworks.
While it’s technically not a Disney film in the strictest sense of the world, if you mention Pinocchio in front of anybody from any generation, and the first thing that pops into their head is Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel, then they’re talking mince, with Walt’s 1940 animated effort the definitive version of the story, and it’s not even close.
There have been many other movies made featuring the wooden boy in the decades since, and as evidenced by Robert Zemeckis’ shockingly crap live-action reboot, or, even worse, Roberto Benigni’s 2002 version, where he decided that casting himself in the title role despite the obvious drawback that he was a 40-year-old man, tackling such an iconic tale can easily end in disaster.
It’s hard enough to imagine Kubrick making a kids’ film, and it’s even harder to imagine him making one about Pinocchio, Geppetto, and the rest of the gang, but he was. According to his long-time friend and personal assistant Emilio D’Alessandro, anyway, and as a member of the notoriously reclusive auteur’s inner circle, he had a much better insight into his creative mind than most.
“Stanley was interested in making Pinocchio; he sent me to buy Italian books about him,” D’Alessandro revealed. “He wanted to make it in his own way, because so many Pinocchios have been made. He wanted to do something really big. He said, ‘It would be very nice if I could make children laugh and feel happy by making this Pinocchio.”
Not very Kubrickian, is it? Then again, as Guillermo del Toro showed with his stop-motion spin on the story, if you take a talented filmmaker and give them the leeway to adapt such a well-known tale that’s been embedded in popular culture by somebody else, the results can be spectacular.
D’Alessandro shared that the 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon mastermind had been considering Pinocchio as a potential next port of call while putting the finishing touches on Eyes Wide Shut, which would have been quite the pivot for him to make at that stage of his career.
How do you follow a three-hour psychosexual mystery thriller that set a world record for the longest continuous film shoot? By setting your mind to a 19th-century book that gave rise to one of the most enduringly iconic entries in Disney’s entire animated back catalogue, apparently.
