138. Pinocchio (1940)

Produced By Walt Disney

Synopsis

Paedophile golem creating satanic warlock Geppeto creates a little boy out of wood to satisfy his more preverse desires, through the art of Astrology he manages to summon a soul from the fiery pits of hell to give his sex-puppet life. Pinocchio escapes a life of sexual abuse by joining a theatre, familiar jiminy cricket and summoned infernal Blue Fairy steal Pinocchio from honest working ethnic minority man. Pinnochio manages to escape the paedophile ring only to be put in an island where children are nothing but asses being sold to the highest bidder by the coachman. After escaping and kicking the heroin habit, Pinnochio sees no chance but throw himself off a cliff with a stone attached to his tail. He is swallowed by a whale and just when he thought he could rest he meets the Warlock again; he ends up dead in a bed in the house of Geppeto, the Evil. Who actually manages to revive Pinnochio by the use of the infernal Blue Fairy who also makes Pinocchio fleshy, as Geppeto was having some trouble with splinters in the nether regions.

Review

Well this film is much better than Snow White, and as the second long feature with a story by Walt Disney, it is a marked improvement. The animation techniques haven't really changed, neither would they until the advent of CGI, but there is so much more stuff happening on the screen that it just looks much more impressive.

Again there isn't much to say about plot, much like Snow White it is little more than a series of events following each other. Only here the events are actually more interesting than in Snow White, and there is a level of horror here which is ever greater than that on Snow White. In Snow White you basically had the wicked stepmother, here you have the theatre owner, the coachman, Honest John, Monstro, loads of stuff and they are all quite freaky.

If you are interested in the story of animation, this is really an indispensable film. The evolution is great from Snow White to this and as this came out before Fantasia, the step would be even greater there. So you should get this at Amazon UK or US.

Final Grade

8/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Pinocchio was not commercially successful when first released, and Disney only recouped about half of its $2.3 million budget, which was due in part to poor timing, with the cut-off of European markets due to World War II. By the time the film was released, the mood of Americans had also darkened, also due to the war. People just weren't as keen on seeing fairy tales as they were in the days of Snow White.

But there were other reasons why Pinocchio didn't quite pan out on initial release. One thing that Snow White had that Pinocchio didn't was romance. There wasn't much in the way of "falling-in-love-at-first-sight" in Pinocchio, as there had been in Snow White, which apparently was what people had come to expect of in Disney. To add insult to injury, Paolo Lorenzini, nephew of the original story's author, had beseeched the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture to charge Walt for slander in portraying Pinocchio "so he easily could be mistaken for an American," when it was perfectly obvious that the little puppet was in fact Italian. Nothing had apparently come of the protest.

Nevertheless, there were positive reactions to the movie as well. Archer Winsten, who had criticized Snow White, wrote: "The faults that were in Snow White no longer exist. In writing of Pinocchio, you are limited only by your own power of expressing enthusiasm." Also, despite the poor timing of the release, the film did do well both critically and at the box office in the United States. Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as a fanfare for The Walt Disney Company itself. Pinocchio also won the Academy Award for Best Song and the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and in 1994 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years. Overall, Pinocchio is considered a true-blue classic today,and many film historians consider this to be the film that most closely approaches technical perfection of all the Disney animated features.

Pinocchio: