If I had to decide which is better, Disney's "Pinocchio" or "Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night", the Disney film but only marginally. This is a wonderful underrated gem from 1987, that is a lot of fun. I grew up watching the Disney film, and also love the book by Carlo Collodi. (I mean, he's a real boy lusting over a *doll* people look at the looks he's giving her!) This is a very trippy movie. This last character (the puppet, not the minion) is the focus of a crush from Pinocchio, and I guess this is supposed to be romantic but it comes across as very creepy. Along the way, he has run-ins with a wooden insect, a monkey who is eerily prescient of JarJar Binks down to the last stupid big tooth, and a pretty girl puppet owned by Satan's minion. Pinocchio's adventure leads him from an evil carnival to a freakish neon Hell populated by small children and lastly to the domain of a quadrimanous Satan. It's like somebody wanted to do an animated film of _Faust_, got bored with it, and decided for the heck of it to throw Pinocchio and Gepetto in it (other characters from the _Pinocchio_ story show up in poor disguises).
#PINOCCHIO STORY ARCH MOVIE#
I happened to run into "Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night" in the bargain bin of a thrift store recently, bought it remembering only that I had rented it several times as a kid, and came away concluding that it's going to take one heck of a cartoon to beat this one! This movie is crazy. Now I'm sure my raging fans (all two of you) are well aware that I can't get enough of weird cartoons. If I'm not mistaken, I think it's just about my one-year anniversary here at IMDB. Some sections of the film may seem like filler, like the scene involving a toad and a city of insects which lasts a bit too long, but other than that I give Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night an enthusiastic recommendation. And the sidekicks aren't half as tiresome or irritating, with the only ones being a glow worm voiced by Don Knotts and a bee named Grumblebee. It's got everything the modern animated flicks have, but without the crass marketing. Now this is coming from a guy who's reviewed countless animated movie, but I think it's safe to say that young kids could still get a kick out of this movie. Like I said before, much of the visuals of the movie are extremely well done and give the movie a vintage '80s feel I couldn't help but like. Finally there's "Your A Star," which while not a phenomenal song once again fits with the visuals of the sequence. "Neon Cabaret" is more of a background song than "Love," but it still has a nice little jazz beat that goes well with its scene, a night club where children basically throw back green alcohol (come on ya know it was alcohol) and go nuts. True, the Fairy Godmother may sound like she's doped up during her speaking lines, but the song is great. I can't get enough of "Love Is The Light Inside Your Heart," which is just a beautiful little pop ballad that I can't get out of my head because it's so memorable.
I can't get through this review without mentioning the handful of songs which are peppered throughout Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night. I'm not saying any of this will scare kids today, as they've probably seen much worse, but it does give a good balance to the otherwise cheerful imagery. In fact, much of the movie is downright dark, from the opening sequence where a demented carnival seems to set itself up to Pinocchio's transformation back into a puppet.
The animation is usually quite vibrant and expressive, and the story takes the usual Pinocchio antics in a different direction by providing an actual villain in the uber-creepy Emperor (voiced by that staple of movie villains, James Earl Jones). Sure, you could nitpick that the animation is inconsistent, with some scenes appearing less detailed while others are excessively so, and that certain backgrounds are obviously repeated during chase scenes ala The Flintstones (it's even more pronounced here due to the visible line in the visuals), but frankly those didn't hamper my enjoyment of the film. After ordering a copy from and watching it again all these years later, I was pleasantly surprised that Emperor entertained me even at my usually cynical age. For me one of those movies was Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, which is definitely a lesser known animated feature but all the same still holds up today. I think that when all of us were kids we had one or two movies that we loved so much that we sat down and watched them dozens of times.
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