It's not just names starting with P that these two properties (another word starting with P) have in common.
And it hasn't help that both properties have had a plethora of remakes lately. (I don't like the word "plethora" but it fit alliteratively here.) The frenzy of activity surrounding Pinocchio was mostly limited to last year, when there were two prominent remakes released in the same calendar year. The versions of Peter Pan have been stretched out over a higher number of years, but with an overall greater sense of the saturation point having been reached, as Joe Wright's Pan came out in 2015, followed by Benh Zeitlin's Wendy in 2020.
When I heard that another Peter Pan was coming out this year, I started to slap my forehead -- but before my palm could reach the skin above my eyebrows, I saw that it was being directed by David Lowery, and disengaged the motion. Simply put, David Lowery knows how to make a live action Disney movie. His version of Pete's Dragon (what is it with Lowery and Disney characters named Peter?) was superlative, and I'm glad to report I can say the same about Peter Pan & Wendy. But more on that in a minute.
The reason my instinct was to slap my forehead is because like Pinocchio, this is a story that has never really captured my heart. Both films are frequently cited among Disney's classics, and neither has ever done much for me as stories. I definitely would have seen the original 1940 animated Pinocchio when I was a kid, though I think I had to discover the 1953 Peter Pan as an adult -- a young adult, since I can't remember seeing it within the past 30 years either. (My movie lists say that I've seen it, so it must be true. I know at least I've read the storybook, which is basically a teleplay of the movie, to my kids when they were younger.)
And really, because I hold both stories at a similar distance from me, their plot details have started to overlap with one another. Oh, there are certain things that easily stand out as either one or the other. Like, I never think that Tinkerbell is Pinocchio's companion (though Jiminy Cricket fulfills a similar function), and I've never thought Peter Pan's nose grows long when he lies.
But which film ends within the belly of a whale? I do know it's Pinocchio, but there are aquatic misadventures in Peter Pan too, as Captain Hook struggles to avoid ending up in the belly of a crocodile.
And which movie has the lost boys? Well they both do, kind of. The wannabe pirate boys that Peter Pan led to Neverland are literally called the lost boys, but the boys on Pleasure Island in Pinocchio, who drink and smoke and are turned into donkeys, are quite lost themselves, aren't they?
And in which movie is there talk about who wants to be a real boy? Well no doubt that's the wooden Pinocchio who says that, isn't it? It sure is, but that doesn't mean those same words don't escape the lips of Peter Pan, at least in the movie I saw last night. In a confrontation with Hook, Peter finishes one of Hook's sentences about himself becoming "a real boy." Peter is flesh, unlike Pinocchio, but he is also not "real" in that his age is stuck in a suspended state -- as though he were a doll.
The stories also share an "and then this happened" narrative structure that I dislike. I can't really say which one is the greater offender here, but the events on both journeys proceed in this sort of haphazard way that don't feel connected to one another. I guess that's the nature of a story built around a journey, but I feel a similar sense of befuddlement when watching both of these stories progress.
At least I can say that the most recent version of both stories was pretty terrific indeed. Even if I don't love the stories, in the hands of a great filmmaker they can sing.
You'd know that I had a fondness for Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, which finished 24th on my 2022 year-end list. There, the craft was just at such a high level, matched by the imagination of del Toro in the choices of how to tell the story, that it overcame any doubts I had about the worthiness of the underlying story. In fact, I had this sense that it should have ended even higher on my list based on those qualities alone, except that indeed, what a movie is about ends up being nearly as important as, if not more important than, how it's about it.
And now I can say that after the big disappointments that were Wright's Pan and Zeitlin's Wendy, Lowery's Peter Pan & Wendy is another big win for the director. When I write a review this weekend, I will likely marvel over the way Lowery can split his career between Disney movies and metaphysical treatises that show an absolute freedom from anyone else's creative control. But he even brings a little of that independent spirit to the look of his Disney movies. As I was watching Peter Pan & Wendy, I thought of Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are in terms of the look and feel, though the tone of this one is ultimately more user friendly and embracing. The thing just looks terrific, with the effects incorporated seamlessly, all the most profound camera angles -- which are so without calling attention to themselves -- and exceptional performances throughout, particularly Jude Law as Hook.
Now that I've consumed a total of five versions of these stories within the last eight years -- six, actually, when you consider that my lone viewing of Steven Spielberg's awful Hook was also in April of 2015 -- I'd say I should probably, finally, be able to determine which is which, and whose real or lost boys go with which story.
And if I can't, the pattern seems to suggest that someone else will make another remake of one of these stories no later than 2025.
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