Buy it... if you desire a really strong Alan Silvestri children's score, this one reprising elements from The Witches in a resoundingly superb orchestral mix.

Avoid it... if you desire a really strong Pinocchio remake soundtrack, for the mashup of 1940 and 2022 songs is tenuous and the latter group largely forgettable.

Pinocchio: (Alan Silvestri/Glen Ballard) For years, Disney pondered how to adapt its 1940 animated classic, Pinocchio to the live-action digital era. The transition wasn't necessary except for the studio's relentless push to reimagine all of its original animated favorites, and this story presented challenges that eventually fell to director Robert Zemeckis to solve. There have been countless cinematic retellings of the 1883 Italian story, but 2022's Pinocchio represented Disney's own, best attempt to modernize the production values of the tale. Aside from some relatively minor alterations to the plot, including diminishment of the Blue Fairy, the 2022 story remains faithful to the classic film. Elderly woodcarver Geppetto of a small 1895 Italian town mourns the loss of this son and wishes upon a star that the boy be brought back to life. The Blue Fairy honors that wish to make Geppetto's puppet recreation alive, and Jiminy Cricket, among other animal characters, try to help Pinocchio be an honest soul and thus become a real boy permanently. Not surprisingly, he gets caught up in trouble with a theatre group and ends up on an island for disobedient children who, because they make jackasses of themselves, are turned into donkeys for labor. Pinocchio must escape the island, find Geppetto, who sought out to recover him but gets swallowed by a whale, and reconcile their relationship. The headline appeal of this poorly-received Pinocchio remake is Tom Hanks in the role of Geppetto, though some liberties were taken to modernize the soundtrack as well. Many of the foundational decisions about the songs and score for the film were decided by Zemeckis, who recognized the need to find a blend of the classic songs and, for updated dramatic elements of the story, a handful of new ones. Purists will recoil at any deviation from the 1940 songs by Leigh Harline and the score adapted out of them by Paul J. Smith, as that soundtrack won an Academy Award and is long considered a true Disney classic. Its opening song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," is so famous that the studio has used it extensively as its official logo music.

One could argue that composer Alan Silvestri and songwriter/lyricist Glen Ballard were dealt an impossible hand with Pinocchio, but they managed to provide Zemeckis with the updates he was seeking. When they arrived on the scene, the film was already spotted with three of Harline's classic songs, and Zemeckis had identified the position of four new ones, including a dominant entry for the villain, the Coachman who takes the kids to Pleasure Island. Silvestri's history with Zemeckis is extensive, of course, and Ballard collaborated with Silvestri on the songs for The Polar Express to much acclaim, including a Grammy win. The 1940 soundtrack had helped to establish the Disney musical process of taking the melodies from the songs and extending them into the score, and since the filmmakers of the 2022 version didn't consider the movie to be a "musical," its re-envisioning got caught in ambiguity over that definition. The three surviving songs from 1940, "When You Wish Upon a Star," "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee, An Actor's Life for Me," and "I've Got No Strings" are dropped into this film without any connection to other material. The Harline melodies for those songs permeated the 1940 score, but they have absolutely no impact upon this one. In fact, the "When You Wish Upon a Star" reprise at the finale of the film is itself completely missing, a teased Jiminy Cricket version used over the opening logo (not on the album) and the full song simply placed over the end credits. The re-recording of these three songs is fine, with the "When You Wish Upon a Star" performance by Cynthia Erivo particularly moving, but expect these renditions to be shorter than their 1940 equivalents. Sadly, the brief duration of all the songs in this version of Pinocchio is a significant problem, as it reinforces the feeling that the songs were mandatory needle-drop inclusions rather than vital narrative contributors. Some of the songs are so intertwined with score material in their own confines that the mood of the vocals fails to take hold. Without repeat enunciation of the main melody and chorus sequences for each song, it becomes impossible for the casual listener to identify that melody when it transitions into the score. The songs themselves are also too short to appreciate on album.

One of the most disappointing complicating factors with the new songs of Pinocchio is Hanks' abysmal performance of his two entries, making Emma Watson's head-spinning auto-tuning for the 2017 remake of Beauty and the Beast sound somewhat reasonable. Hanks speaks most of his lines and is out of tune the rest of the time, further obscuring already obtuse melodies provided by Ballard and Silvestri. Surely, he plays a broken man in his first song, but that doesn't totally excuse the choppy performance. The tragedy of "When He Was Here With Me" is that it provides the melody that should most impact the score. Whereas the Harline song melodies don't carry over for Silvestri, those in the four new songs definitely do, and that of "When He Was Here With Me" falters in the score because Hanks doesn't make it clear enough in the songs. This issue is exacerbated by the fact that the instrumental backing for that song doesn't help Hanks along by amplifying the lines of the melody, a typical technique for assisting a spoken or otherwise poor vocal performance. With such an awful performance, it's difficult to therefore classify "When He Was Here With Me" as a song, and its melody gets lost as a result. What little phrasing does shine through has the faint hallmarks of an Alan Menken melody. Those passages do recur relatively frequently in Silvestri's score, pretty in the middle of "You Should Have a Name of Your Own" and at 0:26 into "Am I Real" and thereafter. It's tender in the latter half of "Off to School," emerges on piano in the waning portions of "This Will Be Your Home," offers brief reminders in the middle of "He Sold His Clocks to Find Me," and shows hints early in "We're All Here," though casual listeners may not notice any of these tangential references. Hanks' other song is "Pinocchio, Pinocchio," a laughably exuberant entry that fits well with Harline style of songs but is obliterated by Ballard's embarrassingly poor lyrics and terrible Hanks singing. This melody is highly distinctive, though, and while fragments peek through in the bubbly start to "Off to School," they open the first half minute of "Famous!" more clearly. Both of these songs are ineffective alongside the Harline originals, and don't expect many listeners to gravitate towards them on album.

The other two new songs from Ballard and Silvestri for Pinocchio also highlight the awkwardness of these additions overall. Starting as a decently yearning, romantic, aspirational ballad is "I Will Always Dance," but it suddenly shifts gears to explore wild Latin flair that represents the strangest inclusion on the soundtrack. The script must have demanded this explosion, but it shouldn't have. The ballad portion explores quite a good melody in its primary phrasing, but it's badly underutilized in the song and elsewhere. This main phrase of the song at 0:42 informs the "Sabina's Waltz" score cue and is suppressed with tragedy about a minute into "This Will Be Your Home," returning only to flutter in the first minute of "I Have an Idea." The villain's song in Pinocchio exercises the most potential, and it's the only idea to receive something of a reprise. The underlying rhythmic formations of "The Coachman to Pleasure Island" are dominant even if the melody is nebulous. The song itself is buoyed by Luke Evans' spirited and pitch-aware performances, shifting to a secondary ditty in its latter half. In the score, the melody is introduced at 0:26 into "The Collection," with some nice variations throughout. The personality of its children's choir extends to "Pleasure Island," where that ensemble becomes more serious in quasi-Danny Elfman fantasy mode late in the cue, and Evans' reprise of his vocals closes the cue. This material becomes rambunctious for a moment late in "I Wonder Where Everybody Is" and blasts at 2:37 into "Somebody Help Me." While these references to the song in Silvestri's score are commendable, they are often underplayed. In the 1940 score, Smith referenced both Harline's material and offered some motifs of his own, and Silvestri took the same very basic route here. But less heralded are the moments in 2022's Pinocchio that supply nods in its score to Smith's work. Stylistically, the two scores are quite similar, with orchestral colors often matching in equivalent cues. Accordion usage persists from the 1940 score for the school and society concepts, for instance. Passages dominated by bassoons in one score will often feature the same in the other. In many ways, Silvestri has simply modernized the techniques used by Smith to flesh out the 1940 score, though the 2022 alternative is less cartoonish on the whole.