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View Full Version : Anyone seen "Pinocchio and The Emperor of the Night"?


CyrusGrissom
03-25-2007, 10:31 PM
Cool and very dark yet underrated 1987 animated fantasy about a creepy mysterious carnival that comes to town, Pinocchio just celebrated his first birthday as a human for must do an important task for his dad to deliver a jewel box to the mayor but makes an idiot of himself by selling to it a raccoon and a monkey for a worthless fake ruby. His dad gets p'oed so much that Pinocchio decides to run away to join the carnival for he falls for the lovely girl puppet star of the carnival named Twinkle and is tricked by the evil puppet named Puppetino who magically changes him back into a puppet, he does escape as he finds the two scumbags that swindled him to go after the traveling carnival to get the jewel box back and end up in the hellish, Las Vegas-esque and nightmarish empire of the night conducted by the evil Emperor.

A very entertaining and well animated flick from Filmation (The production company behind "He-Man", "Star Trek Animated", "Starchaser: Legend of Orin", "She-Ra" and "Fat Albert") which i believe is their best animated movie besides "Starchaser" and is quite an improvement over other Filmation animation. There's a few good songs here like the haunting "Love is the light inside your heart", the jazzy "Neon Cabret" and the best one which is the hip "You're a Star", the film does have some dark stuff like the absolutely horrifying moment where Pinocchio slowly transforms into a puppet as we see through his eyes hordes of puppets with creepy faces look at us which almost got a "PG" rating.

I remembered when i was 5 seeing this at the shopping mall theater in St.Louis back on christmas night 1987, it scared the living crap out of me. But now i love it as it's definitely one of my personal favorite animated movies, it features the voices of James Earl Jones, Don Knotts, Ed Asner, Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Bosley and Scott Grimes ("Critters 1 & 2" and "American Dad") and it's one of those rare 80's forgotten fantasy gems of animation much like "Fire & Ice" and "Rock & Rule".

I highly recommend this if you can find a VHS copy.

starlac
03-26-2007, 04:27 AM
I haven’t seen the film, at least I don’t think I have, though what you described seems oddly familiar to me (must of read it in an animation book somewhere).

Anyway, I’d noticed that it was given a DVD release in the UK, so I’ve ordered myself a copy, if only so I can profile it, review it and see if it really is any better than Filmation’s general levels of animation quality. That and the fact that I do like picking up rarities and oddities in the field of animation that no-one’s ever heard of, or indeed may want.

CyrusGrissom
03-26-2007, 06:11 AM
Yeh you should do a review on it after you watch it, but don't bother with Filmation's last animated movie "Happily Ever After" cause that one sucked, this one is way better and so is "Starchaser: Legend of Orin if you seen that one.

Lucky_Bob
03-27-2007, 08:44 AM
My dad was an animator on it but I've never seen it.
He also was an animator on Happily Ever After.

I haven't seen either films but my dad personally hated both :P