Saturday, October 24, 2015

Pinoke: Wooden Head/Eye of Pine



            Last month, PBS had a two-part special on Walt Disney.  The later, megalomaniacal part of Disney’s career was familiar to me, but the first part, on how Disney and his large staff developed their marvelous animation techniques was new and fascinating.  Capping Part I were the first Disney features, Snow White (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), the latter considered perhaps the pinnacle of feature-length animated film. 
 
Young Disney
            The Disney film was based on a satirical tale by Carlo Lorenzani whose pen name was Carlo Collodi, first published in 1883. Collodi’s Pinocchio details the picaresque adventures of a walking, talking marionette. He finally becomes a real boy after a series of fantastic adventures, in which he
Carlo Lorenzani a.k.a. Colladi
gradually comes to an understanding of human emotions and responsibilities, as he evolves from childhood to adolescence.

            Seeing film clips within the documentary, I remember now why Pinocchio was the favorite film of my childhood.  My first encounter with it was its first re-release, when I was about four or five.  Someone had read me Collodi’s story, and I didn’t like it very much—it was way too satirically anarchistic for my kid’s mind at that point.  Disney’s version, on the other hand was perfectly comprehensible to a small child.  From the very first, I was enthralled with the crazy marionette show sequence, and also the carnival atmosphere of Pleasure Island.  At that point, I though Jiminy Cricket was an annoying nerd, and the Fox and Cat were silly, but the Blue Fairy and the red-cloaked Coachman were objects of fascination. I was into bright colors then, so naturally the brightest parts were the most fascinating: I loved the tawdriness of Pleasure Island for its kaleidoscopic glitter, including the shattering of a stained-glass window.

            In an age before media blitzes, CD’s and streaming video, you had to wait for the tightly-controlled re-releases to see Disney films again, and until I was ten or eleven, I caught every revival of Pinocchio.  We had all the songs on 78 (and later 45) rpm. records, and for a number of years my friend Nancy and I did endless re-stagings of the marionette show between viewings (we misconstrued Jiminy’s remark “What a buildup,” said after Stromboli’s introduction as “What a Pillbox!,” a phrase that became a term for us to describe a jerk—and I still use it).

Collodi's Pinocchio and the Blue-Haired Fairy
            Though copious later academic criticism lauded the Collodi original and denigrated the Disney version as bland and sugarcoated, I maintain that for children, the Disney version really nailed it.  The large number of adventures of Collodi’s anarchistic marionette (and the fact that the wood Pinocchio was made of was alive before Geppetto even carved him) was reduced to the “Little Wooden Head” puppet, and his basic disastrous adventures on the way to responsibility and compassion were limited to two, and these played out within a short time-span.  The cricket Pinocchio slaughtered with a hammer in chapter 4 of Collodi’s story morphed into the top-hatted nerd Jiminy, the usually ignored “conscience.”  And Geppetto, rather than an opportunistic wood-carver who wanted to fashion a marionette to take on the road and make him money, became a very kindly, very naïve toy and clockmaker.


            But if Disney simplified the story, what he and his numerous collaborators produced was an hour and a half of perfectly understandable magic for a small child.  Pinocchio, the wished-for living marionette of a naïve and kindly father, was even more naïve--totally clueless, in fact--but after all, he was literally “born yesterday.”  Kids could certainly identify with pursuing potentially dangerous mischief, and lacked the experience as yet to see its pitfalls.  There were enough villains whose scurrilous natures to scare them into awareness that it was dangerous out there.  It sure worked for me.

            But my perceptions of Pinocchio changed radically as a youngish adult with a child of her own.  The film had dropped off my personal radar once I was a teenager, and I hadn’t seen it for a long time when I took my daughter to see it when she was six or seven.  This time, I was shocked and horrified.  Maternal instincts had kicked in, and I knew that it could be a jungle out there—I can remember my panic when she and I were in Madrid and she got shut out of the elevator I had boarded in a department store.  I was sure that I’d never find her again, she didn’t yet speak Spanish and I was convinced she was Doomed Forever.  Of course, a few minutes later, when I got back down, she was right at the elevator door, being conforted by a group of solicitous Spanish ladies.

The Coachman and Poor Alexander, Once a Boy
            It was the Coachman who frightened me now; I could see analogies to a network of child abductors kidnapping children for underage prostitution and worse (like Enriqueta Martí in her legend), for that now seemed the analogy to me of the donkey-boys sold to the circus or salt mines.  Diabolical Disney underneath it all—and revealing of the megalomania that had always been within him!  It was a relief to me that my kid didn’t like the film at all (she was into the more syrupy sweetness of the later Disney brand until she was old enough for real horror movies).

            I didn’t see Pinocchio again until after seeing the PBS show.  Then I watched it, and found a film that was completely different and fascinating once more.  Before watching it, I reread the Collodi original, and this time found it wickedly satirical and wonderful too, but that Pinocchio was an entirely different puppet-to-person.  I also read a lot of scholarly analyses of both the original and the Disney adaptation, in which the cartoon feature was denigrated for its blandness and sanitation—so typical of Disney from then on, and so much more widely franchised in nature.  This was most scathingly pointed out by David Bosworth in his article “From Wariness to Wishfulness: Disney’s Emasculation of Pinocchio’s Conscience.” The complexity of the Pinocchio story, now mythified, was definitively dilineated in an entire volume entitled Pinocchio Goes Postmodern edited by Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morressey.

            But as a stand-alone film, I’m with Maurice Sendak, and think that Pinocchio is terrific in itself.  I know that Disney and his staff worked and reworked the story over a number of years before they got it right for their particular vision.
The Fairy: Madeleine in Blue


            The movie is a great reflection of the time it was made (1937-1940).  World War II was already raging in Europe, and we needed diversion from an uncertain future.  The country had just weathered the Great Depression, which certainly shaped popular and more serious culture in the 1930’s, and this can be seen in how many of the characters were defined.  The blond and very elegant blue Fairy (not the blue-haired fairy of Collodi) is envisioned like Madeleine Carroll in blue, wafting lingerie and veils, and elegant heeled slippers.  The amoral opportunists Honest John the Fox and Gideon the Cat look and act like a vaudeville team, the fox riffing dialogue like something out of Dickens or the Wizard of Oz and Gideon silent and anarchistic as Harpo Marx (my favorite bit for him is when he blows a smoke ring and tries to dunk it in his beer as if it were a donut). 

Stromboli and Gypsy Puppet-Master

Stereotypes from that era abound: Stromboli is a Gypsy replete with earring, but his accent is like Chico Marx’s, and he lapses into pure cartoonish bombastic gibberish most of the time, just like the marionettes in his show, with their caricatured national accents. Wooden "Cigar-Store Indians" scatter cheroots on Pleasure Island. Typical of Disney too, there are two cats, a coy Figaro and a really giddy Gideon, the alley cat, while Cleo the pet fish is a little flirt, but the wild fish and other sea creatures in the ocean range from cute to exotic and big.  Lampwick  the juvenile delinquent who becomes a donkey is the spitting image of one of the Dead End Kids, a popular gang of street boy characters portrayed in a number of feature films of the period.  The villainous males whether animal or human, have a comical, bombastic edge, except for Monstro the Whale, who is more  a force of nature than a bad guy.
Gideon and his Erstwhile Donut: Up in Smoke

            But the film does have one really menacing villain, the red-cloaked Coachman, who runs the Pleasure Island syndicate.  He reminds me of The Godfather or the head of some drug cartel, seemingly benign to those who play his game, but all-controlling and truly lethal to those who don’t.  Even now I can see him running a criminal empire with cold-hearted efficiency; even his gentler facial expressions are potentially scary.
Coachman as Crime Boss

            Overarching all of this is the sheer artistry and beauty of the animation itself.  More than 30,000 individual hand-painted cells make up the finished film, and the recently invented multi-plane camera aided in three dimensional illusionism.  The result of such painstaking technique allow the figures, man and beast alike, to have a phenomenal elegance and grace of movement, whatever their personalities.  There is nothing like it in contemporary digital animation that so often has a whiplash speed and precision, and the labor-intensive nature of the movie’s fabrication would be prohibitively expensive to duplicate today.  Maybe that’s the point, since Disney’s animators then worked for slaves’ wages, and after this period, Disney and his staff would become adversaries in a bitter labor dispute.

            There would be other variations on Collodi’s tale, and every so often talk surges about a live-action Disney production of Pinocchio.  If there were to be one, I’d never go see it.  Everything would have to be updated: the violence would be digitally enhanced, the sins far more graphic than shooting pool, smoking cigars and drinking beer; Lampwick would probably be renamed “Lightbulb,” and, in our post-Jaws era, Monstro would return to being Collodi’s shark. 
Jaws A More Modern Monstro?


In the case of the 1940 Pinocchio, the medium really is the message.
 
Real at Last!
Some Pinocchio Criticism:

Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morressey, Pinocchio Goes Postmodern, Perils of a Puppet in the United States, N.Y. and London, Routledge, 2002. 

Maurice Sendak, Caldicott and Company: Notes on Books and Pictures, Noonday Press, 1988


David Bosworth: “From Wariness to Wishfulness: Disney's Emasculation of Pinocchio's Conscience” The Georgia Review Vol. 65, No. 3 (FALL 2011), pp. 584-608


Some Youtubes (Sorry for the Commercials)



Metamphosis: Coachman and Pleasure island (Neither has donkey-trafficking scene)