Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Pinocchio: A True Story’ on VOD, in Which Pauly Shore Voices Pinocchio (No, We’re Not Kidding)

This week on WTF Theater is Pinocchio: A True Story (now on VOD), a Russian animated version of the classic fairy tale starring Pauly Shore as the voice of the title puppet-boy. Ponder THAT one, buuuuuddy. Nothing can be weirder than the 2019 magical-realist live-action adaptation of the story, which cast Roberto Benigni as Geppetto and CGI’ed Pinocchio into a nightmare-inducing monstrosity – although Guillermo del Toro’s upcoming stop-motion version might out-strange it in a good way. In the meantime, though, we have the Artist Formerly Known as The Weasel’s immediately recognizable dudespeak emerging from the Pinocchio mouth-hole. It exists, therefore we must deal with it.

PINOCCHIO: A TRUE STORY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: A talking horse with the voice of Napoleon Dynamite stops slurping from its water trough long enough to directly address us, the viewing audience. You know those Pinocchio stories where he lies and his nose grows and all that? Hogwash, he says. You’re about to see what really happened. And it’ll be far more boring than being swallowed by a whale, and that’s me talking here, the film critic who suffers through this shit so you don’t have to.

That horse is Tibalt (Jon Heder), who will become Pinocchio’s (Pauly Shore) horse once Geppetto (Tom Kenny, a.k.a. SpongeBob SquarePants) fathers him from a log. There’s a joke where Geppetto tries to come up with a name for his new puppet, and he says maybe Leonardo, but no, he might grow up to become a selfish actor, and we moan, long and hard. Is this going to be one of those movies? The post-Shrek self-aware pop-culture-referencing twaddle? Someone shove my head in the horse trough and don’t let me surface, please. But it gets tired of that really quick, because why should a movie be annoying when it can be plodding and dull?

Anyway, Geppetto has a wizardess friend named Lyusilda (Kate Lann) who waves her magic thingamajig and renders Pinocchio sentient, after which Pauly Shore does a Valley Guy-via-Eastern-Bloc Dr. Frankenstein impression (you know, “It’s aliiiiive!”) which makes one realize, oh, right, this is one of those movies where you’re supposed to take the edibles about 15 minutes before hitting play. Pinocchio gets restless being Geppetto’s secret quasi-son, so he R-U-N-N-O-F-Ts to join the circus, Tibalt underneath him, which jibes perfectly with the evil ringmaster Mangiafuoco (Bernard Jacobsen), who needs a new act to draw people to the show so his dirtbag friends Cat (Andrei Kurganov) and Fox (Stephen Ochsner) can rob everybody’s houses while they’re not home. It’s quite the racket, about on par with enticing people to drop $5.99 to stream atrociously dubbed Russian cartoons on Amazon.

Pinocchio’s equestrian bit pairs nicely with the song-and-trapeze show of his blue-haired co-star Bella (Liza Klimova). So nicely, Pinocchio falls in love with her, prompting one to ponder how that might work. She rejects him, possibly because she doesn’t want to have sex with plywood, and/or possibly because she wants to protect him from being implicated in Mangiafuoco’s criminal enterprise. And off goes Pinocchio atop Tibalt to find a fairy in the woods who’ll turn him into a real boy, and hopefully one who’s anatomically correct, you know, for Bella’s sake.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Shrek, Hoodwinked!, Gnomeo and Juliet, the immortal Encino Man and whatever will be playing in my head tonight just before I bolt awake in a cold sweat at 3:14 a.m.

Performance Worth Watching: Somebody wanted lunatic line-readings from Pauly Shore-as-Pinocchio, and they got ’em.

Memorable Dialogue: “So one clown said something and then another clown said something, but the real clown here is you, Pinocchio.” – Tibalt lays down some hard, pipe-hittin’ truth on his best pal

Sex and Skin: If only.

Our Take: This how they make Pinocchio in SOVIET UNION: With an annoying, intrusive, omnipresent score; with hideous character design; with the best animation Windows XP can possibly muster; with no whale or donkey or talking cricket; with Pauly Shore as Pinocchio. It will inspire an unsettling mixture of uncontrollable giggles and revulsion. And yet, it’s dreadfully boring. It’s quite the feat in that sense.

I will say this: I laughed so hard at Heder reciting the one clown/another clown speech, I nearly ruptured my spleen, and I was fully sober. You will find laughs here – possibly unintentional, but who can tell – but not as many as you’d hope for a movie that was clearly a shitty paycheck for these voice actors, so you might want to curb your morbid curiosity until this thing streams for free on some third-rate channel in a few weeks. One caveat: If you’ve always wanted to hear Pauly Shore tunelessly sing a song that doesn’t rhyme because it’s translated directly from Russian, in a Pinocchio movie in which he plays Pinocchio, then by golly, you’re not gonna be able to cough up your six bucks fast enough.

Our Call: Pinocchi-oh-no. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.