JIMINY CRICKET! A LIVE-ACTION ‘PINOCCHIO'

After a string of live-action remakes, from “Beauty and the Beast” to “The Lion King,” the Walt Disney Co. has finally gotten around to “ Pinocchio.” Along the way, there have been some nice performances, enormous heaps of CGI and, lest anyone forget, one very blue Will Smith.

Whether any of these movies have done much to improve the originals is very much up for debate, and undertaking “Pinocchio” poses even more particular challenges. Most pressing: What you do with Pinocchio? Nice kid and all. A little wooden. But if we’re being honest here, he’s always been a bit of a dud.

Do you cast a young actor to play the puppet once brought to life? Alongside some live performers (Tom Hanks, Cynthia Erivo) and some CGI characters, director Robert Zemeckis has used computer imagery to render Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) much in the style and vocal pitch of the 1940 cartoon. The effect is an awkward fusion of fake and real that strains to find any magic in between. This “Pinocchio,” unfortunately, is no real boy, at all.

It’s also one of two adaptations of the fairy tale coming this fall. Zemeckis’ “Pinocchio” premieres Thursday on Disney+. Later comes a stop-motion version by Guillermo del Toro. The directors are magicians both, and they will surely have radically different takes on the old Italian tale. In a few months, we’ll be able to compare them, nose to nose.