Flashback: Walt Disney's Pinocchio (1940)
How the animated film tones down the novel's violence while playing up the biblical themes, the showbiz self-mockery, and the naughty humour.
A new live-action version of Pinocchio is coming to Disney+ tomorrow. I have not seen it, but I thought this might be a good time to dust off some comments I made a couple decades ago about the animated film and the book it’s based on. What follows is a slightly-tweaked version of an e-mail that I sent to the now-defunct OnFilm discussion list on June 3, 2001.
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It must be over a month now since I read Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio. And it’s been a few years since I saw a copy of the book sitting in a delete bin and picked it up for three bucks. It had been sitting on my shelf ever since, but a few weeks ago, I finally took it down and gave it a read, and was pleasantly surprised to see just how quick a read it was. The reason I finally got around to reading it? The trailers for Steven Spielberg’s new film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, in which the main character, a robot, says he wants to become a real boy. As it happened, I had also been thinking of getting the DVD of Disney’s version of Pinocchio for a few months at least, and I finally got around to doing that a couple of weeks ago, during the 20-percent-off sale A & B Sound has every few months. Comparing the book and film is quite interesting, and I’ve been meaning to post my thoughts on them ever since, but I’ve been pretty busy the last couple of weeks, and couldn’t do it, until now.
The film, released in 1940, was Disney’s second animated feature, coming three years after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and mere months before Fantasia. The animation is fantastic—from the travelling shots of the whale bearing down on Pinocchio’s raft to the several point-of-view shots to the lighting effects when lightning flashes through the windows of Stromboli’s carriage—and it’s hard to believe this film was made a mere 12 years after the really sketchy animation of Steamboat Willie, the first-ever sound cartoon. I can’t help thinking the film still has a sense of that almost palpable excitement that comes when artists venture into uncharted territory and try things for the first time. But the “effects” don’t overshadow the story, which works on its own terms.
The first thing that strikes me about the story is how biblicized the film version is, in some ways. In the book, Pinocchio starts out as a piece of wood that cries out in pain and asks not to be hurt when Mr Antonio, its first owner, tries to strip the bark off of it and make it into a leg for his table. Then, when Mr Antonio begins to plane the piece of wood, it laughs and says it’s being tickled. This drives Mr Antonio nuts, so he finally gets rid of the wood by giving it to his rival Geppetto, who just happens to make a puppet out of it and give it bodily form. (Geppetto does not learn that the wood is sentient until after he has carved the puppet’s eyes, and they move.) This is very different from the film, where Geppetto makes the puppet first, and then the Blue Fairy arrives and gives the puppet life. In the book, the wood is conscious before anyone handles it, but in the movie, the creation of Pinocchio kind of resembles the creation of Adam, where God bunches the earth in the shape of a man and then gives it the breath of life. The second major biblicized element, I’d say, is the way the film turns the shark that devours Geppetto and Pinocchio in the book into a whale, echoing the story of Jonah. Also, in the film, when the Blue Fairy appoints Jiminy Cricket to be Pinocchio’s conscience, the dialogue has biblical overtones; the Blue Fairy tells Jiminy to “guide [Pinocchio] on the straight and narrow path”, and Jiminy calls conscience “that still, small voice that people won’t listen to.”
The second thing that strikes me about the story is how violent it is, at least in the book, and how Disney softens that element somewhat. In the book, Geppetto and Mr Antonio come to blows within seconds of meeting each other. “They seized one another’s wigs, and even hit and bit and scratched each other.” When Pinocchio’s nose grows, birds come down and peck off the extra wood. When he turns into a donkey—and yes, he goes all the way and becomes a full donkey, unlike what happens in the film, where he merely grows ears and a tail—he is sold to a man who drowns him and plans to skin him for a drum for the village band; but when he is lowered in the water, the fish come and eat his flesh, leaving nothing but the wooden puppet, which was apparently still there beneath the donkey flesh all this time. And at one point, before we find out that the donkeys in True Playland (Pleasure Island in the film) are all former boys, the man who drives their carriage jumps down and bites off half of the ear of one of them, as a punishment for its disobedience. In the film, the violence is suggested more than shown—the scene in which Lampwick turns into a jackass is still pretty terrifying!—and it is foreshadowed, somewhat, by a scene in which Geppetto’s clocks all ring at once; as they make their loud cacophonous noise, we see wooden puppets spanking their children and chopping turkeys and shooting at birds.
In addition, a few of the characters in the book have a peculiar habit of dying and then re-appearing later on. The cricket (he does not have a first name) appears on page 20 and annoys Pinocchio so much that, on page 22, “Pinocchio lost his temper and, seizing a mallet from the bench, threw it at the cricket. Perhaps he did not mean to hit him, but unfortunately the mallet struck him right on the head. The poor cricket had scarcely time to cry ‘Cri-cri-cri’, and there he was, stretched out stiff, and flattened against the wall.” Pinocchio is haunted by the cricket’s wise words, though, and on page 69, the cricket’s ghost appears. Later, Pinocchio is hanged—with a noose and everything—by the fox and the cat, and a few hours later, after his body goes stiff, he is revived by a “beautiful child with blue hair” who, of course, turns out to be the Blue Fairy. Then, Pinocchio gets lost on a couple of adventures and, when he comes back, he finds the fairy’s tombstone (“Here lies the blue-haired child who died of sorrow on being deserted by her little brother Pinocchio”). But then, a very, very short while later, he comes across the fairy again; this time she’s a woman, and she promises to be his mother instead of his sister. (“‘Tell me, mother dear, it wasn’t true, then, that you were dead?’ ‘It seems not,’ answered the fairy, smiling.”)
The change in medium, from book to film, shifts the emphasis of the story somewhat. According to a bio on Carlo Collodi in the book, he was an Italian government official who promoted various educational reforms, and school plays a fairly significant role in the story; Pinocchio even spends several months learning to read and write before the Blue Fairy finally turns him into a “real boy” at the end. When Pinocchio makes contact with Stromboli’s puppet show (Stromboli is actually just called “Fire-eater” in the book, and the other puppets are just as alive as Pinocchio is), it is because he has sold his primer for a ticket to the show, effectively sacrificing his education for mindless entertainment. In the film, on the other hand, Pinocchio is lured by the fox and the cat, who promise to make him a celebrity (“Hi-diddle-dee-dee, an actor's life for me”), and, if one were so inclined, one could make a link between Stromboli’s exploitation of Pinocchio’s special skill and the showmanship with which Disney promoted his own technically sophisticated form of animation. Indeed, the original trailer for Pinocchio, which is included on the DVD, begins with the scene in which Stromboli introduces Pinocchio in his puppet show. There is a self-deprecating sense of humour about all this, though; when Jiminy Cricket despairs that Pinocchio, as an “actor”, will no longer need his help, he says, “What does an actor want with a conscience anyway?”
I was also struck by the way the film flirts, oh so subtly, with sexual and other kinds of lower-body humour. When Jiminy Cricket first shows up at Geppetto’s place, he bends over by a fire and, narrating, says, “As I stood there warming my, uh, myself...” Later, he leans on something, and blushes when he discovers he has placed his hand on a female doll’s bum. For a high-minded conscience, Jiminy can definitely be guided by, uh, baser impulses; he ogles Stromboli’s can-can puppets and, at one point, is about to follow a wooden doll into the clock from which she came, when the door slams in his face. (This last bit takes place right at the climax of ‘Give a Little Whistle’, right after he sings, “And always let your conscience be your guide”!) In the trailer, Jiminy Cricket is described as “the only conscience with a sense of humour,” so make what you will of that. Does the film support the idea that a conscience is a Good Thing? Or is it, perhaps, calling into question the moralism and presumably oh-so-serious piety of the sort of people who emphasize the need for a conscience in the first place? Might it be suggesting, maybe, that even our consciences can lead us astray?
Anyway, both book and film versions of Pinocchio are entertaining, but not for the same reasons, necessarily. And now that I’ve got that story on my mind, I need to find a copy of Brian Aldiss’s ‘Supertoys Last All Summer Long’, the short story that A.I. Artificial Intelligence is directly based on. I wonder if Aldiss ever refers to Pinocchio; the film definitely does, since track seven on John Williams’s upcoming soundtrack album is reportedly called ‘The Search for the Blue Fairy’.
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The original trailer for Pinocchio, as mentioned above: