A talking horse with the voice of Napoleon Dynamite stops sipping water from his trough long enough to speak directly to us, the viewing public. You know those Pinocchio stories where he lies and his nose grows and all that? Nonsense, he says. You are about to see what really happened. And it will be much more boring than being swallowed by a whale, and that's me talking here, the movie 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, aka SpongeBob) spawns him from a log. There's a joke where Geppetto tries to think of a name for his new puppet, and he says maybe Leonardo, but no, he could grow up to be a selfish actor, and we moan, long and hard. Is this one of those movies? Post-Shrek self-aware pop culture reference nonsense? Somebody stick my head in the trough and keep me from surfacing, please. But he gets tired of that very quickly, because why should a movie be annoying when it can be heavy and boring?
Stars: Tom Hanks, Lorraine Bracco, Cynthia Erivo
Anyway, Geppetto has a magician friend named Lyusilda (Kate Lann) who waves her magic little thing and makes Pinocchio conscious, after which Pauly Shore does an impression of Dr. Frankenstein from Valley Guy via Eastern-Bloc ( you know, "He's alive!") which makes one realize, oh right, this is one of those movies where you're supposed to grab your groceries about 15 minutes before you hit play. Pinocchio frets that he's Geppetto's quasi-secret son, so R-U-N-N-O-F-Ts joins the circus, with Tibalt under him, which fits perfectly with the evil ringmaster Mangiafuoco (Bernard Jacobsen), who needs a new act to lure people into the show so their dirty friends Cat (Andrei Kurganov) and Fox (Stephen Ochsner) can rob everyone's house while they're not home. It's pretty loud, almost on a par with enticing people to spend $5.99 to stream egregiously dubbed Russian cartoons on Amazon.
The equestrian part of Pinocchio pairs nicely with the singing and trapeze extravaganza of his blue-haired co-star Bella (Liza Klimova). Alright, Pinocchio falls in love with her, which makes one wonder how that could possibly work. She turns him down, 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 Pinocchio goes on top of Tibalt to find a fairy in the woods that will turn him into a real boy, and hopefully one that's anatomically correct, you know, for Belle's sake.