Pinocchio

If Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was to witness the invention of feature-length animation, then Pinocchio is to see the limits of the form being pushed against, expanded upon, and animation establishing itself as a legitimate film art. If this isn’t the greatest movie Disney has released, then it’s only real competitors are Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty. It’s definitely in the top three Disney animated features, it has to be.

Like many great films, Pinocchio was not a success during its initial run. Its costs ran up to nearly $3 million, only half of which it made back, and it wasn’t until later re-releases that its artistic and critical reputation began to soar. By the time I saw it in the 1992 theatrical re-release, I was five and the film was already considered a masterpiece. With damn good reason too, and it’s always been one of my all-time favorites.

With the heavy-lifting groundwork done with Snow White, Disney and his merry band of co-conspirators were free to go crazy, and so they did. That film relied upon animating recognizable human forms, but Pinocchio is more daring and ambitious. We have a talking cricket, donkey-boys, two humanoid con artists, various wooden puppets and clockwork inventions, a pet cat and goldfish, a monstrous blue whale, and, of course, Pinocchio, who moves like he never finished reading his own instruction manual. It’s a larger ensemble, massive even when you factor in the amount of boys on Pleasure Island, the inky demonic forces that help the sadistic Coachman, Stromboli, and numerous others.

Disney saw the massive success he had with Snow White, and decided to challenge his audience with something larger. Snow White played safely within recognizable story confines – cutesy sidekicks, musical numbers every few minutes, a pretty princess, a handsome prince, one central villain, and a happy ending. Pinocchio puts its characters through numerous trials and tribulations, daring its characters to act morally and not succumb to temptation, and then it makes the temptations look so good. But the characters must always pay for their crimes.

Who could forget Pinocchio’s nose growing? It happens only once, but so disturbing a vision is it that it haunts the rest of the film. He spends far longer with the remnants of his time on Pleasure Island than he does with his nose growing. And lord, seeing the nightmarish descent through the forest in Snow White as a challenge, Pinocchio provides true terror with the transformation of Lampwick into a donkey, or the sight of speaking donkeys begging for forgiveness and to go home. It is the stuff nightmares are born from, and the animators beautifully render it.

Then there’s Monstro, not so much a gigantic blue whale, and more of prehistoric force of nature. A super-monster seemingly as big as the ocean itself, his frame cannot be contained within the confines of the image. He bursts across the screen. His underwater chase is terrifying, yet it’s contrasted with Geppetto’s more humorous attempts to fish while stuck inside his belly. Perhaps Disney felt like the audience needed a break from all of the gloom? After all, Pinocchio is stuck with the donkey ears for the remainder of the film. This happy reunion doesn’t last long, as they must escape his stomach. Their daring escape, and Monstro’s off screen presence is scarier than anything else in the Golden Era, except for maybe “Night on Bald Mountain” in Fantasia.

If Snow White was a simple fairy tale, then Pinocchio is a frightening morality play. It reaches deeper into our psyches and emotions for something true and real. This can all be found in Carlo Collodi’s source material, which is even more despairing and weird than this film, if one can imagine such a thing. While Pinocchio has no shortage of darkness, it plays everything for sweetness and innocence by re-working the titular puppet into a sympathetic figure from the amoral brat he is in the novel. Disney’s long history of playing fast-and-loose with source material really starts here, as Snow White played it relatively straight as an adaptation of its material.

It’s a smarter idea here, as Pinocchio is now a root-able hero, a naïve little boy that want to get his head straight and do right. We want to see him overcome these obstacles, to see the Blue Fairy take pity upon him and grant his wish. While Disney would eventually over-play the fake death and instantaneous revival, it’s actually upsetting in Pinocchio. Deeply, deeply unsettling, as Pinocchio’s life-less corpse is viewed in lovingly rendered detail, yet his final act also grants his wish so we still get our happy ending.

Even when Pinocchio is frequently disturbing us with its various narrative turns, the animation is always of the highest caliber. Not just the character animation, which is fabulous, but the various effects that go into making the film so memorable. The Blue Fairy is highly detailed to standout from the more cartoon-like characters, and her glittering effects work is amazing. Even better are the numerous water effects. Not even The Little Mermaid created so alive an undersea world, or so hypnotic and fluid ocean waves. The chalk details on Figaro’s fur add nice flourishes, but every frame of Pinocchio is filled with these tiny details.

There’s a loneliness at the heart of Pinocchio, and a hard-fought sense of victory at the end. These characters deserve this happy ending because of how much they have suffered to get there, before during the narrative and before it. The high-caliber of animation, the memorable characters, and the beloved songs, everything about Pinocchio works incredibly well. God, I just love how challenging, weird, and daring this movie is. No other Disney movie comes close, except perhaps its fellow 1940 release, Fantasia. Those two films are the studio running at a level of artistry that it would never touch again, ever. Snow White laid the groundwork, but Pinocchio set the standard.