Enchanting ‘Pinocchio’ Goes Against the High-Tech Grain

If Steve Barron’s “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” a live-action version of Carlo Collodi’s famous tales, had been made 50, 30, even 10 years ago, audiences would have been wild about the special effects illusions. Call me old-fashioned, I’m pretty wild about them now.

The problem faced by the makers of this endearingly honest version of Pinocchio is a generation of children accustomed to morphing, that seamless, computer-generated process that allows us to see objects, people and creatures being transformed into other objects, people and creatures before our very eyes.

Pinocchio, as we all know, makes a smashing transformation from hand-carved, wooden puppet to flesh-and-blood adolescent. The metamorphosis was no problem for the animators working on the classic 1940 Disney version. But the big moment in the new film requires a boy-size puppet, with the strong grain of his native pine swirling across his face, to turn into Jonathan Taylor Thomas, who provides the puppet with his voice and likeness.

The transformation doesn’t occur before our eyes. It’s done on the cheap, with over-the-shoulder shots and quick cuts. The same technique is used to create the illusion of boys turning into donkeys in the film’s still scariest sequence.

But the illusion that does work, the puppet version of Pinocchio interacting with his human co-stars, creates enough wonder and enchantment to carry the picture over its budget hurdles. Using a combination of remote-controlled animatronics and hand-operated puppetry from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Pinocchio becomes the real deal, a child among children, and kids in the audience will love him.

Writer-director Barron, an MTV veteran who scored a monster kids hit with “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” knew how to spend whatever money he had. For starters, he cast the always sympathetic Martin Landau as the old carver Geppetto. If you have to be carved from a scorched stump, you couldn’t pick a more loving craftsman.

Barron also made the risky decisions of going back to the Pinocchio of the politically disenchanted Collodi’s original vision, child as anarchist, and adding a love interest for Geppetto. Leona (Genevieve Bujold), Geppetto’s widowed sister-in-law, was the love of the young Geppetto’s life, but he was too timid to do anything more about it than carve his and her initials in a tree.

All these years later, Pinocchio is born of that same tree, a love child with the initials over his heart. That romance, which essentially replaces the Blue Fairy in the Disney version, is what distinguishes Pinocchio from the other puppets hanging lifeless in Geppetto’s shop and fills him with dreams of becoming a real boy.

The subtext also keeps Geppetto in the story, and Landau plays him with such total paternal conviction, you cannot help but root for the three to become a family.

“The Adventures of Pinocchio,” shot on storybook locations in the 15th century Czech town of Cesky Krumlov, sends its little hero on the usual rounds. To school, where his nose quickly gives away his penchant for stretching the truth, to his kidnapping by theater people, his trip to a theme park for truants, where he barely escapes the donkey fate, and in and out of the belly of a whale.

There are some very silly scenes that will appeal only to small fry, and Pinocchio’s mischievousness has an occasional dark edge to it. At times, you think you’re watching Chuckie, the psycho-doll in “Child’s Play.”

Nevertheless, “The Adventures of Pinocchio,” which, by the way, features its own animatronic version of Jiminy Cricket, has enough magic and goodwill to make it one of the summer’s surest family outings.

* MPAA rating: G. Times guidelines: The boys-into-donkeys scene scares the little ones every time.

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‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’

Martin Landau: Geppetto

Jonathan Taylor Thomas: Pinocchio

Genevieve Bujold: Leona

Udo Kier: Lorenzini

Bebe Neuwirth: Felinet

A Kushner-Locke production, released by New Line. Director Steve Barron. Producers Raju Patel, Jeffrey Sneller. Screenplay Barron, Sherry Mills, Tom Benedek, Barry Berman, based on the novel by Carlo Collodi. Camera Juan Ruiz Anchia. Editor Sean Barton. Music Rachel Portman. Production design Allan Cameron. Costumes Maurizio Millenotti. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.