Robert Zemeckis directs this 2022 live-action reimagining of the classic wooden-puppet tale, built around Tom Hanks and young newcomer Benjamin Evan Ainsworth.
What is Pinocchio about?
Inside a cluttered woodcarving shop, a lonely craftsman finishes a marionette and, under a falling star, wishes for a companion of his own. The puppet wakes able to walk and talk, but wishing turns out to be easier than living: a small conscience-driven cricket, a scheming fox, a traveling show, and a perilous stretch of open sea all stand between him and an ordinary boyhood. Musical numbers carry the story from the workshop out into the wider world, testing at every stop whether the puppet can tell honesty apart from whatever sounds most convenient in the moment. The production leans on songs and effects-heavy set pieces to retell a story most households already know, updating its texture rather than its shape.
About the cast
The ensemble surrounding Ainsworth's title performance includes Tom Hanks, Luke Evans, Cynthia Erivo, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Keegan-Michael Key, Lorraine Bracco, and Kyanne Lamaya, spanning both on-screen and voice work across the cast list.
Context & significance
Comedy, musical numbers, and family-fantasy tone sit side by side here, in the tradition of studio productions that rebuild an animated classic in live-action form. Color-era production values and digital effects stand in for the hand-drawn frames of the original telling, while the songs remain the connective thread holding the episodic journey together across its 105-minute runtime. Reception on release was mixed rather than one-sided, the kind of modest critical standing that comes with retelling material audiences already hold close.
Watching Pinocchio on Ktime
K-Time streams Pinocchio with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, playable free once a household logs into its account. The Farsi-language interface makes switching between the two options simple, so a family movie night can run fully dubbed while an older viewer nearby reads along in subtitles instead.