Pinocchio (film)

• Release Date: 1940
• Director(s): Hamilton Luske; Ben Sharpsteen
• Writer(s): Aurelius Battaglia; William Cottrell; Otto Englander; Erdman Penner; Joseph Sabo; Ted Sears; Webb Smith

In 1940 Walt Disney Productions released Pinocchio, the second of its three major releases combining innovative experiments with animated feature films. It followed the highly grossing 1937 release Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Along with Fantasia, which was also released in 1940, the three animated features are widely considered the pinnacle of the Disney studio’s early artistic animation. Many critics consider Pinocchio technically the most nearly perfect of the studio’s cartoon features.

Pinocchio is based on an Italian children’s novel by Carlo Collodi that for years had intrigued Walt Disney as a powerful film plot. In the end the movie can be seen as a morality tale that offers cautionary messages to children, but taking such a simplistic view of its impact misses the power of the animation. Pinocchio is a genuinely groundbreaking movie.

Plot

One of the main animated characters, Jiminy Cricket, opens the movie with its signature song, "When You Wish Upon a Star." The little green cricket explains that he will tell a story about a wish coming true. As his tale unfolds, he becomes a character in the story.

It begins in a woodworking shop owned by an old man named Geppetto. Jiminy watches as Geppetto finishes a wooden marionette of a boy. Geppetto calls the marionette Pinocchio, and before he falls asleep he wishes upon a star that Pinocchio will become a real boy.

While Geppetto sleeps, the Blue Fairy visits the workshop and brings Pinocchio to life. However, he remains a marionette. The Blue Fairy tells Pinocchio he will become a real boy if he proves himself to be "brave, truthful, and unselfish." Jiminy Cricket is assigned the task of being Pinocchio’s conscience.

In the morning Geppetto is overjoyed to find that his wish has come true. He sends Pinocchio to school like a real boy. On the way Pinocchio falls in with a pair of rascals. They invite him to join a puppet show run by the unsavory Stromboli. Despite Jiminy’s warnings, Pinocchio joins Stromboli and becomes the star—a marionette who dances and sings without strings. He performs with a variety of companion marionettes, including French can-can girls and cossacks from Russia. When Pinocchio tries to go home, Stromboli imprisons him in a cage.

Jiminy finds Pinocchio trapped but cannot free him. The Blue Fairy appears and asks Pinocchio why he missed school. As the marionette’s conscience, Jiminy advises Pinocchio to tell the truth, but Pinocchio lies. His nose grows longer and longer with each lie he tells. Pinocchio then promises to be good, and his nose shrinks again.

Pinocchio then is convinced to visit Pleasure Island where he encounters other boys living without rules or authority. To Jiminy’s distress, Pinocchio joins in a variety of negative behaviors, from gambling and smoking to drunkenness and vandalism. Jiminy then learns that the curse of Pleasure Island is the boys who make fools of themselves on the island are transformed into donkeys that will be used to work in salt mines and circuses. Jiminy gets Pinocchio off the island before he is completely transformed, but he has the tail and ears of a donkey as they leave.

Finally home again, Pinocchio and Jiminy find an empty workshop. The Blue Fairy lets them know that Geppetto tried to rescue Pinocchio from Pleasure Island but was swallowed by a whale named Monstro. Geppetto is alive but trapped inside the whale’s belly. Pinocchio leaps into the sea with Jiminy beside him and is soon swallowed as well. He and Geppetto are reunited. Then Pinocchio comes up with a plan to escape Monstro’s belly by making the whale sneeze.

Monstro destroys their raft, but Pinocchio manages to save Geppetto by pulling him into a cave. Jiminy and Geppetto survive the pursuit, but Pinocchio does not. As Geppetto and Jiminy mourn the marionette, the Blue Fairy decides that Pinocchio has proven himself to be brave, truthful, and unselfish. To Geppetto’s joy, Pinocchio is reborn as a real boy, and Jiminy is given a badge as an "official conscience."

Significance

Much of Pinocchio’s enduring power comes from its effects animation—the animation of everything in each scene that is not the movement of a character. Machinery and vehicles in the background move realistically, as do waves, rain, lightning, smoke, and other natural elements. Disney’s effects animators experimented endlessly to get the look right, and in Pinocchio they succeeded completely.

One innovative technique that makes the movie so compelling is called the "multiplane camera," an invention of Disney studios. It allowed the animators’ drawings to be created in three dimensions and seen on screen as if a camera were passing through a three-dimensional set. This innovation had been developed for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and it was perfected in Pinocchio. The camera moves through apparent aerial shots, as if on a crane or a plane, passing through characters or structures in the foreground to finally arrive at a close-up.

Similarly, the Disney animators constructed scenes more like a live-action film than any previous cartoons. Characters often interacted with other characters who were not in frame with them, like a live actor speaking to another actor whose position is behind the camera or off to one side. Prior to Pinocchio, most animated films stayed inside the frame.

Critical acclaim has grown steadily for the movie. It was hailed as a masterpiece in many of its initial reviews, and it won two Academy Awards for music in 1940: best original score and best original song. The song "When You Wish Upon a Star" became the Disney theme song. In 1994 the movie was added to the National Film Registry, and in 2008 the American Film Institute listed it as the second-best animated film of all time—after Snow White. It also appears on the AFI’s 100 Years . . . 100 Films list. Time magazine named Pinocchio the best animated movie in its June 21, 2011 list of "The 25 All-Time Best Animated Films."

Awards and nominations

Won

• Academy Award (1940) Best Original Song
• Academy Award (1940) Best Original Score

Bibliography

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