Chances are you are reading this expecting some kind of commentary on the most recent cinematic interpretation by an Oscar-famous Spanish directer of a curious but incredibly well-known Italian children’s book of 1883. Chances are you’ve read a few reviews of this film already, looking for some kind of consensus that will motivate you to finally watch it or to avoid it and not waste your precious time or money. Or maybe you’ve already seen it and God knows why you’re bothering with another review at this point, unless you’re one of those people who fancies themself to be some kind of critic or intellectual who seeks out others’ opinions looking for insights they might’ve missed, or to bolster some belief in themselves as somebody who’s as smart or smarter than the reviewers, always a worthy ambition. The fact is we are all insecure about ourselves, each in our own way, and if it works for you, then go for it!
If you are like me and most people who are not Italian (and maybe not even most of them) and especially here in North America, chances are in no way have you read the book, “The Adventures of Pinocchio” but only know about it because of a previous movie for which it had provided source material. That movie dates back to an effort by Walt Disney Studios which first appeared in 1940 and was simply titled “Pinocchio”, after its main character. Why Walt and the team left off “The Adventures of” from the title of the book may or may not be a mystery, as the Disney legal team has long had a reputation for knowing their way around copyright infringements and the like.
One might like to think that Walt had a warm spot in his heart for a book his mother had read to him when he was just a tyke back in Missouri or some warm and fuzzy notion like that, but the fact is one of his studio animators brought it to his attention after the studios’ first big hit, Snow White, had gained much acclaim, and it was time to come up with a worthy followup. One might like to think that the animator found some dusty copy of the book on a library shelf or in some Hollywood used book store, but the story of “The Adventures of Pinocchio”, about the wooden puppet who longed to become a “real” boy, is anything but obscure. When Carlo Collodi published it in 1883, he struck a nerve in the popular imagination. Carlo, a lifelong Florentine whose real name was Lorenzini but who took on Collodi as a pen name (it was his mother’s Tuscan home town), wrote mostly about Italian politics for many years until he became disenchanted with that endeavor and switched to children’s books. Of course if you’re like me, everything you know about Pinocchio you got from Disney, but it turns out Walt and his studio are just one face in a rather immense crowd of artists and entrepreneurs inspired by Carlo’s clever and original tale.
The fact is, Carlo’s book was one of the very first books written for a newly growing children’s market, and its popularity was immediate and on a grand scale. It subsequently became one of the most well known and widely translated books by an Italian, ever, and after Collodi’s death in 1890 it inspired any number of Italian wannabe spinoffs (Pinocchio in Africa 1903, P Under the Sea 1913, Heart of P 1917, P in America 1928). A writer named Tolstoy (Aleksey, not Leo) penned a popular Russian version, “The Adventures of Buratino” in 1928, and much later, in 1997, we got maybe the first novel, Robert Coover’s “Pinnochio in Venice.” The first film version came out in 1911 and was only one of many before and after Disney’s 1940 classic. In 1952 we got the Japanese manga series, Astro Boy, to add to a long list that also includes radio plays and TV musicals and at least one opera, some horror and sci-fi interpretations, a video game, appearances in the Shrek movies and with the Muppets, and maybe this whole bewildering avalanche of Pinocchio-inspired material will settle out once and for all with the recent advent of the “lying face” Pinocchio emoji. Or more likely it will never end, at least not until humans are gone from the planet or replaced by androids that are in fact just another kind of puppet when one thinks about it, and wouldn’t that be ironic? One can only wonder what they might come up with.
A responsible reviewer of any Pinocchio material would do well to read the story in the original, but hey, this is just a review and not some academic paper. So many flicks arise from comic books and mysteries and romance novels and easily digestible bestsellers and nowadays even video games (video games!) that nobody in their right mind would expect a reviewer to have waded through so much silliness that in the end may have little bearing on the cinematic experience. Really now, would they? Not to mention genuinely mighty tomes like Pride and Prejudice and David Copperfield and Gone With the Wind and heaven help us War and Peace (!) just to mention a few. There are only so many hours in the day, people, even for those who write about movies!
An energetic debate, the one about “which is better the book or the movie version?” has raged since the advent of cinema and the fact is it usually comes down to personal taste and whether someone was once an English major in school. It is also doomed to be forever inconclusive and tends to be a topic avoided by movie reviewers as something outside their purview. Having said that, this fearless and daring reviewer is willing to mention here that he recently watched the Jane Campion film “The Power of the Dog”, about cowboys in Montana in 1925, mainly because it featured Benedict Cumberbatch playing a western cowpoke with a flawless American accent, and this reviewer is a big fan. The film, which is austere and slow-moving and stunningly visual and downright odd in parts (not loved by everybody, that’s for sure), was fine in its way but far more important is that it inspired this reviewer (a former English major if you haven’t already figured that out) to pick up Thomas Savage’s novel from 1967, which was praised by critics but read by almost nobody else at the time. It’s a wonderful read, funny and painful with rich details and characters and insights and about a hundred or maybe a thousand times more material than the movie was able to include. One critic described it as “the finest single book I know about the modern West” (William Pritchard, Hudson Review), and this reviewer would not consider doubting that opinion.
Whether Carlos Colloidi’s “Adventures of Pinocchio” is the finest single book about a wooden puppet is a question that will have to remain unanswered for now, but for this reviewer’s purposes Wikipedia has much useful information about what the book contains, starting with down-and-out Geppetto, starting a career as a puppeteer, receiving an enchanted piece of wood from a carpenter, which he carves into the little guy we know all too well. Before the job is barely started, Pinocchio’s feet try to kick Geppetto, a foretaste of what is to come, for when the puppet is complete he immediately runs out the door, to be found by a policeman who throws Geppetto in jail for being neglectful for allowing his boy to run the streets. The puppeteer gets released in short order but in the meantime Pinocchio comes across a cricket that warns him of the perils of disobedience. For offering this advice our hero throws a hammer and kills him. The fact is, Carlos Collodi portrays this character in many unflattering ways, showing him to be pretty much a cold ungrateful “inhuman” brat, easily conned into doing mischief and learning repeated lessons from the school of hard knocks. Early in the book he gets hanged by the Fox and the Cat, a couple of grifters who turn up a number of times throughout the narrative. After the hanging, with P hovering between life and death, the Fairy with Turquoise Hair turns up to revive him, giving him advice about not being lazy and studying hard and working to support his father, advice repeated at times by the ghost of that cricket. This is the point in the story which introduces the concept (this reviewer would call it kind of a gimmick) of how Pinocchio’s lying causes his nose to grow, in what may be Collodi’s finest moment of didactic genius. It is also right about here where we first learn that Pinocchio has the chance to become “a real boy” if he only straightens up and flies right.
Other writings by Collodi suggest he was very concerned about the morals of Italian youth, and that his books could play an important didactic role in making them into proper Italian adults. Whether this helped sell product is anybody’s guess, but the endless creative plot twists and bubbling energy of the narrative no doubt helped make it a hit. Pinocchio runs off and joins a circus. P is almost chopped up into firewood. He almost gets skinned and made into a drum. He gets sentenced to four months in prison by a gorilla judge “for being foolish”. He runs into the Fairy again, on the Island of Busy Bees, and she promises he can become a real boy if he stays in school for a year and studies hard, an effort she will sponsor. He almost pulls this off but at the last minute is lured by a no-account “friend” to the Island of Toys, where they gradually become donkeys because boys who play and never study always turn into donkeys. And on and on it goes: Geppetto goes looking for the lost Pinocchio and ends up being swallowed by the Terrible Dogfish. Pinocchio somehow ends up sharing that same digestive tract with Geppetto until a tuna helps them escape. They run into a Talking Cricket who offers them lodging in the house he obtained from a goat with turquoise hair. They live together, Pinocchio working and supporting Geppetto, now old and frail. Pinocchio gives his last forty cents to a snail he met back on the Island of Busy Bees, for the Fairy who has grown ill; she visits him in a dream and transforms him into a real boy, while Geppetto is restored to health. Happy Ending!
This is only part of what Wikipedia relates about the story, and it may not be exactly as they tell it, but the flavor of it all is more or less captured here. If you have actually read the original story, you have this reviewer’s admiration and apologies, and he can only hope reading it made you into a better person, whether you are Italian or some other nationality. Better people can be found anywhere, though they tend to be scarce.
So having apologized for not taking time to read the original text, there is yet another apology to be made here, or maybe more like an explanation, or maybe what is only a trivial biographical detail; you decide. This reviewer confesses to having seen Walt Disney’s Pinocchio only once, in its third theatrical release which happened in 1954 which was a very long time ago, when he was five years old. It may have been his first trip to the Chicago Loop, and was almost certainly his first experience in the vast dark interior of a genuine movie theater (he hopes it was the Biograph, outside which the notorious John Dillinger was gunned down by G-men in 1934 after seeing a film there, but it probably wasn’t). He vividly remembers bits and pieces of it, if not the entire narrative, which includes Jimmy Cricket singing “When you wish upon a star” as well as horrifying (and confusing) images of little boys turning into donkeys and terrifying moments of Monstro the sperm whale chasing and consuming the poor puppet. These moments might have been this reviewer’s first encounter with real trauma, given that his childhood up to that point had been blessedly mundane. Hey, it was dark and pretty scary in there! It is a fact that these images remain vivid in his mind almost 70 years later, such are the powers of the story and Disney Studios’ brilliant animation, which many claim reached some pinnacle in this film that has never been surpassed, it was that good.
Given that Disney’s Pinocchio had numerous theatrical releases every so many years for decades and became readily available by other means after that, it is entirely possible you, dear moviegoer, have witnessed it at some time, though if you’ve never seen it on a big screen, it’s a pity. The world long ago determined it is an epic and groundbreaking piece of animation, one that has been duly praised and awarded since its inception. Even today, it has a 100% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes, if that means anything at all, which to some it might not, and so what? If you’ve seen it, however old you were in the moment, chances are it was memorable in its way, as it was with this reviewer when he was young and vulnerable and impressionable and thank God he has come to terms, more or less, with the trauma, and he sincerely hopes the same is true for you!
But an important part of the story is how Walt and his studio messed with the original in a number of crucial ways, especially important insofar as to many, if not most, Disney’s version is all they know and who was that guy Collodi, again? The name “Pinocchio” sounds kind of Italian, for sure, and you’re telling me the original version was somehow Italian? One wouldn’t know it from what Hollywood protrays. Our hero wears a Tyrolean hat and red shorts that could very well be dyed lederhosen, like he lives in the Alps down the cowpath from Heidi or something. and the setting is more or less cartoon generic. Besides that you’re also telling me that in the original story Pinocchio was kind of rude and nasty, at times? A kind of cold impulsive ungrateful brat who killed the cricket? And that the cricket showed up as a ghost who looked like a real cricket, with six legs and big curvy antennae? And that Pinnochio looked like a somewhat crude wooden puppet?
A bit of Wikipedia history regarding the Disney development of Carlos Collodi’s 1883 story is informative. Disney studios was a giant enterprise even in the 1930s, and the best creative minds brainstormed numerous ideas before final choices were selected, with Walt himself having the final word, as one might expect. Carlos’ thoughtless brat who was clearly an animated bit of carved wood was seen as a bit too edgy, so his character was made more boyish and impish and mischievous – Edgar Bergan’s nationally known puppet, Charlie McCarthy, was seen as a useful role model – and Pinocchio was visually smoothed out, already “real” in most ways except for his squarish arms and legs and his jointed knees. As for the cricket? First of all, he got a name, “Jiminy”, and after several iterations where he really looked like a bug, Walt’s unhappiness with this concept led to Ward Kimball, one of his top guys, coming up with what he described as “a little man with an egg head and no ears”. Ward also remarked (with a wink, no doubt) “he was a cricket because we called him a cricket”. It is neither here nor there that this reviewer’s father would drive him past Kimball’s estate in the San Gabriel Valley when he was a kid, to gape over the fence at the full scale locomotives and rolling stock that the Disney artist kept on the grounds. It was very cool.
And a word needs to be said about the voice of Jiminy Cricket, the one-time vaudeville performer Cliff Edwards, whom most of the world knew as Ukulele Ike. Edwards started singing in bars when he was 14 and just kept going. So many venues had unusable pianos that he taught himself the ukulele and the rest is history. Going by the name of Ukulele Ike, his career took off in the 1920s, where he played on stages and the radio, and Edwards is given the most credit for starting America’s ukulele craze of those years. At some point while playing in Los Angeles, he was offered roles in the movies, including three Buster Keaton features, and the two were known to sing duets while on set. Disney studios’ selection of him to play the Jiminy Cricket voice was a no-brainer, though it’s a pity that most viewers of Pinocchio, if they’re like this reviewer, knew nothing about the man and his story until many years later. What is even more pathetic is that Cliff Edwards, despite all his talent as a musician, with his jazz and scat-singing and command of the ukelele, sank into obscurity after the 1930s, and watching Pinocchio does not necessarily lead one to find out more about who the heck provides the voice for that cricket?
Which brings us to the present day and Guillermo del Toro’s “Pinocchio”, titled just like the Disney version and not after Collodi’s “Adventures of”, which may or may not signify anything of importance. This reviewer watched it before doing any of the comprehensive and elaborate research that has no doubt impressed you in the preceding paragraphs. It is important to note that it was del Toro’s film, with its nod towards the story’s Italian origins, that inspired this reviewer to find out about Collodi and how the real story of Pinocchio had nothing to do with Hollywood or some inexplicable whim of Walt Disney’s.
As it turns out, del Toro also saw Disney’s Pinocchio when he was just a child, and claims he liked its “horror elements”, but unlike this reviewer he had a bit more ambition and the right talent and knew by the time he was a teenager that some day he’d make his own version of the story. Whether he read Collodi back then or much later doesn’t matter, the fact is a more Italian-flavored production one could not imagine. The scenery and characters are a clear if cartoony depiction of the Tuscan countryside or wherever, and above all we get a good dose of Catholic elements – the puppet confronts a grisly wooden Jesus crucifix in the local church, a fellow wooden carving like himself, and naively asks what it’s all about? Jesus, of course, does not reply, and Pinocchio is a bit surprised. We also get visions of a culture steeped in Fascism, for it is the time of Mussolini. Lucky Pinocchio even gets to perform for Il Duce at one point in the film, imagine that (!) This puts about as much distance between del Toro’s version and Walt Disney’s as one can imagine, without even mentioning that the cricket, now a struggling writer named Sebastian, is pretty close to being a perfect likeness of something you’d find in your garden.
We don’t get the Isle of Toys or the donkey horrors; instead we get the horrors of war, bombs and land mines and folks dying and children training to fight. We also get a grand theme whereby Pinocchio dies a number of times and travels to a kind of limbo where he meets Death, portrayed as a wild mythical concoction of various animal elements with a human face, who relates how since P is not “real” he is immortal, which might sound great but for one thing – it means one will witness the deaths of everybody they love. I leave it to the viewer to watch this flick themselves and ponder their own reactions to the cosmic significance of this message.
Aside from that, the animation is spectacular and stays true to Collodi’s intentions for the most part. The puppet, for one thing, always looks like something crudely carved of wood, even at the end when he becomes “real” and mortal, and to the Spanish director’s credit, all the messages of being “good” and obeying your parents dutifully and always letting your “conscience be your guide” as Jiminy sings it are mercifully left out of his version. In the grandest twist of this, Pinocchio saves all of them from digestion in the bowels of the sea monster by telling a string of strategic lies. Ponder that, and realize that this version of the story offers a lot more to adults than it might to your kids, though it might get the family to have some interesting and probably confusing conversations, starting with how unquestioning obedience to parents and authority figures in general can lead to really nasty things like Fascism. Good luck explaining Fascism to the little ones, but maybe even del Toro had nothing like that in mind when he made this great film, which of course is this reviewer’s opinion of it and might not be yours after you’ve seen it. No movie review is to be completely trusted, as any moviegoer with experience will tell you.
(the featured picture at the top of this post is the only marionette owned by this reviewer, a “Lil’ Dragon”; it is not Pinnochio but might make for a good spinoff movie, as if the world really needs one of those)