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.
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| 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
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| Carlo Lorenzani a.k.a. Colladi |
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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Jaws A More Modern Monstro? |
In the case of the 1940 Pinocchio, the medium really is the message.
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| 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
Gideon and Harpo: http://moviepilot.com/posts/2015/08/04/these-11-celebrities-who-inspired-your-favorite-disney-characters-might-just-surprise-you-3438712?lt_source=external,manual
Some Youtubes (Sorry for the Commercials)
Puppet Show: : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQC5bQKPj6o
Metamphosis: Coachman and Pleasure island (Neither has donkey-trafficking scene)
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