For once I agreed with the hype and the hoopla: Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio” is the movie of the year, and is fully deserving of its almost unanimously rave reviews. I took umbrage, though, at a few critics who tried to use Mr. Del Toro’s wooden actor as a big stick with which to beat up on Walt Disney and his classic version of “Pinocchio.”  

Some pundits even dismissed the Disney movie as “sentimental” and “saccharine.” To be fair, even the Disney organization itself seems to misunderstand the importance of its own film, as it demonstrated a few months ago when it released a trifling “live action” version of “Pinocchio.”

Even though this remake stars the formidable Tom Hanks and is directed by an Oscar winner, Robert Zemeckis, it seems to suggest that the current corporation regards “Pinocchio” as merely another piece of IP to be reworked, repackaged, and “monetized.” 

Let’s get one thing straight: The 1940 “Pinocchio” is a masterpiece. It makes less sense to compare the Del Toro and the Disney films to each other than it does to compare the original to “Citizen Kane.” Just as Orson Welles essentially reinvented the cinema, with this one film Disney defined and perfected the animated feature film, establishing it as an artistically valid medium.  

In a parallel to how Pinocchio himself spends the entire story trying to become “a real boy,” Disney and his remarkable crew of animators and actors established beyond the furthest shadow of a doubt that animation could be “real” cinema. As for Disney’s “Pinocchio” being saccharine, the lead character himself may not be “real,” but the emotions that the film triggers are devastatingly genuine.  

The most famous and frightening example of that is the Pleasure Island sequence, whereby — stop right here if you haven’t actually seen it — naughty little boys are horrifyingly and painfully transformed into donkeys.  It’s not only more frightening than any of the delightfully macabre images found in most of Mr. Del Toro’s films, it’s actually one of the scariest sequences, for children or adults, found in anything ever produced by old Hollywood. It’s considerably more disturbing than a similar transformation sequence in an out-and-out horror film, such as “The Wolf Man,” from a year later.

As a dramatic moment, the scene is positively Shakespearian: What we learn from “Pinocchio” is that when one hits the bottom of the moral compass, you shouldn’t be surprised to actually turn into Bottom from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (I confess that even as a child, I always questioned the business model here; donkeys must be an especially valuable commodity to justify an investment as huge as the construction and operation of Pleasure Island.)

Mr. Del Toro wisely avoided the Pleasure Island sequence. Mr. Zemeckis had no choice but to include it. The “live action” (meaning CGI) donkey transformation isn’t nearly as powerful as in the original, but still the demented amusement park scenes are the highlight of this version. One gets a sense that current Disney creatives took a sinister delight in coming up with a wickedly twisted parody of the whole theme park concept — literally an abusement park.

“Pinocchio” is a work of its time: The look of Blue Fairy reminds viewers of Carol Lombard; the attitude and body language of Pinocchio’s pal Lampwick echoes Mickey Rooney at his cockiest; as the voice of Jiminy Cricket, Cliff Edwards — who was then known to the world as Ukulele Ike — uses contemporary slang; and Pinocchio’s own dance during “Give a Little Whistle” includes some distinctly jitterbug moves. Yet it’s like what Shaw once said of Shakespeare: The more the film digs into the specifics of its own era, somehow the more timeless it becomes. 

The Del Toro film is hardly the only major retelling of the story; indeed, there have been so many European cinematic adaptations of the classic book by Carlo Collodi that the famous Italian comic actor Roberto Benigni has directed and played Pinocchio in one (2002) and, almost 20 years later, played Gepetto in another (2019).  

Who would have guessed that, between Disney and Del Toro, one simple wooden character could support the combined weight of two movie masterpieces? It only goes to show that Pinocchio and his friends are truly the puppets of our better nature.