Pinocchio: A True Story

Pinocchio: A True Story (Russian: Пиноккио. Правдивая история, Pinokkio. Pravdivaya istoriya) is a 2021 animated fantasy film directed by Vasiliy Rovenskiy and adapted from The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The film was released in Russia on 17 February 2022.

An English dub of the film was released in the United States by Lionsgate Films on 22 March 2022 and featured Pauly Shore as Pinocchio, whose voice acting became a viral meme on Twitter and TikTok when a clip from the trailer gained traction.

Plot
Pinocchio, accompanied by the horse Tybalt, runs away from his genius creator Gepetto to see the world and joins a travelling circus run by the hustler Mangiafuoco.

Production


Pinocchio: A True Story was directed by Vasiliy Rovenskiy and produced by him with Roman Borisevich and Maxim Rogalsky. The film was released in theaters in Russia by Sony Pictures on 17 February 2022. In November 2021, its North American rights were acquired by Grindstone Entertainment.

The trailer for an English dub of Pinocchio: A True Story with Shore as Pinocchio was released by Lionsgate Films in late January 2022. Shore had previously worked with Lionsgate for the English dub of the Russian animated film My Sweet Monster and recorded his voice lines for Pinocchio: A True Story during Christmas in 2021. The dub became a prominent Internet meme when a clip from the trailer with Pinocchio saying, "Father, when can I leave to be on my own? I've got the whole world to see," in a flamboyant tone went viral on TikTok and Twitter. Lionsgate reposted the clip on their own TikTok account and captioned it "the yassification of Pinocchio", while Shore posted a video of himself lip-syncing to the dub on TikTok. For Rolling Stone, EJ Dickson wrote that Shore's voice acting in the film made him a "Gen-Z TikTok LGBTQ icon". Joshua Kristian McCoy of Game Rant wrote that the trailer became "the target of a truly apocalyptic amount of ridicule" because of Shore's "wooden" performance.

The English dub was released by Lionsgate on 22 March 2022 on DVD and on video on demand on Amazon Prime Video and iTunes. Following the film's release, users on Twitter dubbed Shore's version of the character "fruity Pinocchio" because of Shore's "classic drawn-out vowels and sarcastic-sounding voice" and shared other clips from the film that went viral. The film's English dub was also released on 21 April 2022 in theaters in New Zealand.

Critical reception
In a review for Common Sense Media, Jennifer Borget wrote in a three-star review that Pinocchio: A True Story had a simple enough plot for younger audiences to follow and "just enough humor and intrigue" for adults, praising its "serendipitous" conclusion, "delightful" voice cast, and "humorous spin" on the original fairy tale, but writing that "the animation quality leaves a little to be desired". Fletcher Peters of The Daily Beast wrote that the film was "completely ludicrous, embarrassing, and almost impossible to believe that it's real—and yet entirely entertaining" and that it had been made into an "instant cult classic" by Twitter users, adding that Shore's performance "proves that he's a bonafide master of the art" of voice acting. For Decider, John Serba called the movie "dreadfully boring", its score "annoying, intrusive, [and] omnipresent", its dubbing "atrocious", and its character design "hideous", also writing that it had "the best animation Windows XP can possibly muster" and describing Pauly Shore's voice acting as Pinocchio as "a Valley Guy-via-Eastern-Bloc Dr. Frankenstein impression".