YMMV / Pinocchio: A True Story

• Angst? What Angst?: Pinocchio seems completely unfazed by being called an abomination and shot at, expressing little more than mild annoyance over it. Granted it didn't hurt him physically thanks to his being a puppet. But you'd think that kind of reaction would hurt at least a little bit emotionally, especially if you're supposedly a Wide-Eyed Idealist like Pinocchio.
• Awesome Music: The song Bella performs in her circus act manages to be quite enchanting.
• Bile Fascination: A lot of people saw the trailer, pegged the movie as a train-wreck and decided to watch it purely to witness how gloriously it would crash and burn.
• Cliché Storm: At its core, this is a very by-the-numbers animated flick about a young boy protagonist who wants to see the world while dealing with an overprotective parent, before transitioning into him trying to win a girl’s affection, while Pinocchio’s usual goal is mainly fueled by his desire to win over his lover interest.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Most reviewers approaching the film have complained that it has nothing to do with Pinocchio as they know it, not realizing that it was effectively a modified and renamed adaptation of The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino. Though to be fair on their part, given that Buratino is incredibly obscure outside of Russia and was a loose retelling of the same story that took a radically different direction with time, it's an easy mistake to make given Lionsgate did nothing to indicate the real origin by throwing the Pinocchio branding on there for sales, and the Russian version labeled it as a Pinocchio retelling too!
  • While many viewers do know the movie is an English dub of a Russian animated movie, they often say it’s the dub, when actually there exists two separate UK dubs that are far less ridiculous and much lighter on the ad-lib.
• Fan Nickname: This version of Pinocchio has been dubbed "fruity Pinocchio" by the internet thanks to Pauly Shore's…interesting performance.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The main reason people noticed this movie was due to Pauly Shore’s…..unique interpretation of Pinocchio. Most agree that Shore elevated what would otherwise have been an incredibly generic cash-grab of an animated movie into being So Bad, It's Good.
• Memetic Mutation: Many, and most of them stem from the US dub.
  • Fruity Pinocchio ^Explanation Many viewers noted that Pauly Shore's performance as Pinocchio had shades of a stereotypical Camp Gay accent, leading to a running gag that Pinocchio was gay, fruity, "yassified", etc.
  • Pinocchio dies. ^Explanation There's a bizarre scene around the beginning of the movie in which Cat, freaked out by Pinocchio being a living puppet, pulls his gun on him and shoots him square in the chest. Its meme-potential couldn't be ignored by viewers, leading to a lot of edits in which the credits roll after Pinocchio is knocked down, as if the character just actually died.
  • Faaathur, when can I leave to be on my o-hown? I've got the whole wooorld to see! ^ExplanationA quote from Pinocchio in the US dub's trailer, which immediately caught people's attention for how its delivery shifts from incredibly flat to Camp Gay within the span of a few seconds. As a result, it became popular to quote and parody in reference to the film.
    • Alternatively, "world to see" being interpreted as "worldussy", due to the concurrent online popularity of combining various words with "pussy", especially in the more flamboyant side of the gay community.
  • "Skidee, Skidee, Skidee!" ^Explanation An ad-libbed line when Pinocchio runs towards Tybalt after Gepetto lets him go to see the circus.
  • "Imma boy and I'm aLIIIIVE!" ^Explanation Pinocchio's first line in the movie which is done in a hilariously overdone bellow as he flops around on the floor figuring out how to walk.
  • "Thank you DADDY! I knew you couldn't say no!" ^Explanation Another line singled out for how Camp Gay it sounds. Pinocchio ends up sounding less like he's thanking his father for letting him see the world and more like he's thanking his sugar daddy for buying him a new Lexus.
• Older Than They Think: For anyone aware that the film is effectively a modified and renamed adaptation of The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino, this isn't the only time that the film adaptation of a story better known in Russia was released in the Western world under the name of a work more familiar in the West. The 1953 Soviet Sadko was released in the U.S. as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, the title under which it appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000. The only differences here is that Buratino was already a loose retelling of the Pinocchio story, and that the Russian version already labeled it as a Pinocchio retelling too!
• Questionable Casting:
  • Most people who watch the movie agree that Pauly Shore was severely miscast as Pinocchio. It's just a special kind of creepy to hear a man in his fifties try (and fail) to voice a character who's supposed to be around 11 (physically). Not helping matters is that he makes him sound like a combination of Camp Gay and The Stoner.
  • Being an overweight, bearded Repulsive Ringmaster, you would expect Big Bad Mangiafuoco to have a suitably deep, booming voice (akin to his Disney counterpart), but instead, he sounds like a regular guy working at a convenience store.
• Signature Scene:
  • "Father, when can I leave to be on my oooooownnnn? I have the whole woooorld to see..." from the first trailer is what shot the movie into the stratosphere of memes in the first place due to Pinocchio's "Yassified" voice.
  • If the above scene somehow didn't make it clear, then the later scene where Cat shoots Pinocchio basically hammers home just how insane the movie is.
• So Bad, It's Good: The majority of western viewers watch this film solely to laugh at the mediocre animation, the out there plot and the comically bad voice acting of Pauly Shore.
• Unfortunate Character Design: The Cat wears a white bag over his head when trying to rob Pinocchio and Tybalt, with his pointed ears sticking up underneath it. His resemblance to an early Klansman has often been ridiculed in many reviews for the film.
• Vanilla Protagonist: There really isn't much to Pinocchio in this movie. He's a talented horse rider and acrobat, but has no discernible personality aside from a generic desire to see the world (that gets forgotten as soon as he sees a pretty girl) and he utterly lacks his mischievous nature from the book, turning him from an interesting and flawed protagonist to a rather bland Nice Guy. Pinocchio's physical abilities and movements are likewise depicted as straightforward reproductions of a biological human's, relegating his nature as a puppet (which the film's narrative otherwise heavily underlines) to more of an Informed Attribute than scarcely influences his talents and perceptions or contextualizes his eventual transformation into a "real boy" by the film's conclusion, further cementing this rendition of Pinocchio as a generic broadly-ambitious teen protagonist.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?:
  • One of the most...jarring elements of the film is Pauly Shore's accent as Pinocchio. Many have attempted and failed to figure out what kind of accent it is other than it being 'Pauly Shore's accent'.
  • Lyusilda, the fairy, is even worse in that regard. Her accent seems to waver from a southern drawl to Australian to Scottish, all of them done very badly.

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