Year: 1940
Supervising Directors: Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske
Starring: Cliff Edwards, Dickie Jones, Evelyn Venable, Mel Blanc, et al.
Next up, Walt Disney's second animated feature, Pinocchio. This is another one that I saw as a small child but not since, and, again, I think I liked it better this time. Apparently it's loosely based on the 1883 book The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, and is the story of a marionette who is brought to life by his father's love, and must prove himself to be "brave, truthful, and unselfish" in the face of various temptations in order to become a real boy.
I have read that Pinocchio is Walt Disney's technical masterpiece, and this may well be the case. The animation is seriously impressive; the movie is worth watching for that alone. It's just that large portions of the plot don't make any sense.
But first things first. This movie looks superb. It uses the same multiplane camera that was developed for Snow White, but the layering really shines here because there's so much more going on. The technique is really evident in all the sweeping shots of the little city, in the zooms through windows, and in the brief scene of motion in perspective out the carriage window after Pinocchio is kidnapped.
Other impressive bits of animation include the many clocks in Gepetto's shop; and the scenes under the ocean, which have a neat watery distortion effect that changes in response to the characters' movement.
I wasn't nearly so impressed with the actual plot of the movie, though. (I am not familiar with the source, although its Wikipedia page makes it sound even weirder than the adaptation.) Part of this might just be the effects of age: for one thing, my twenty-first-century cynicism finds the whole idea of a grown man wishing on a star difficult to take seriously. And since the whole thing is about acquiring good morals, many scenes have suffered from changes in our idea of "vice". For instance, I found it pretty funny that Pinocchio's first step astray is wanting to be (gasp!) an actor! , and that when Jiminy Cricket finds him on Pleasure Island, he chastises him for "drinking! Smoking! Playin' pool!"
Other elements just don't make logical sense, or raise more questions than they answer. Like, wouldn't it be vastly cheaper to just breed jackasses than to maintain a free amusement park for delinquents? And why does Pinocchio's family think that he has drowned, when he just spent about seven minutes at the bottom of the ocean with no ill effects? (For that matter, how do you even tell if a puppet is dead?)
I did like some of the characters-- for one, the Blue Fairy. She's a more womanly character than Snow White was, in animation style and behavior--she's mature, beautiful, even a little flirtatious. She's also the most realistically-animated character in Pinocchio, and the way she's drawn shows a dramatic improvement from the human characters in Snow White.
Jiminy Cricket is also pretty interesting. I have this vague impression of him as Disney's iconic paragon of virtue, and I had forgotten that in his debut movie he is a fallible character. Leaving aside his weakness for wind-up women, he actually walks out on Pinocchio twice before he stays true. I hadn't noticed as a kid that Pinocchio's conscience also learned something.
(Trivia: Jiminy Cricket's name is a pun--the phrase is a mild oath, probably a corruption of "Jesus Christ". The character has largely supplanted the oath, which makes it a little bizarre when the seven dwarfs exclaim it in Snow White. You're two years early, guys!)
Another thing that I did really like about this movie was its extensive use of double-takes for humor, which is taken to a whole new level when Pinocchio comes back from his apparent death, and Gepetto argues with him about whether he is alive. It's very funny, and it hasn't gotten old.
Overall, I'm glad to have watched Pinocchio again. It's entertaining and a pleasure to look at, and it's certainly worth seeing once. But I don't plan to watch it again anytime soon.
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Things that probably wouldn't make it into a G-rated Disney animated movie in 2009, for whatever reason:
- Smoking, even though it's mostly done by the villains, and is depicted as unpleasant when the hero takes it up. Especially the scenes with children smoking.
- The same for drinking.
- Offensive national stereotyping. The "around the world" puppet show with the various foreign women throwing themselves at Pinocchio, for one thing, but mostly the fat, swarthy villainous Italian puppet-master Stromboli. I don't speak much Italian, but I am pretty sure that the "Italian" he keeps lapsing into is gibberish...
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Next up, Fantasia!
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