![]() It’s easy to see why Jiminy Cricket would want to hang out there, sexy inanimate ladies and all. For a movie that doesn’t last 90 minutes, Pinocchio devotes an awful lot of time to establishing the comfy security of home. I suspect part of the reason Pinocchio can get away with being so disturbing is Jiminy Cricket, our narrator and entryway into what appears to be a cozy, sentimental, but fundamentally lonely world. It brings to mind Spring Breakers, which had a slightly more adult take on the pleasures and perversions of Pleasure Island. ![]() And that’s remarkable, because the Walt Disney version is dark and disturbing in its own right. Nathan: I have not read Collodi’s The Adventures Of Pinocchio, although I have heard that is indeed a nasty piece of work, much darker and more disturbing than the Walt Disney version. What do you make of the movie’s being retooled for children, while still carrying so much horror, and so many mildly risque gags for adults? ![]() (Okay, go ahead and get me started: That dance is hilarious.) And while I hate Disney’s habit of putting characters through fake deaths and instant revivals, I still have to admit that the lovingly painted image of Pinocchio’s “corpse” floating face-down is pretty unsettling. And don’t get me started on Stromboli’s Dance Of The Disturbingly Well-Defined Buttocks. It’s a little off-color, too: Jiminy Cricket is quite the little skirt-chaser, gawping at salacious can-can puppets, manhandling the ass of a big-bustled ceramic doll, and flirting with clockwork women. The whole business with the donkeys on Pleasure Island is unnerving and nightmarish. Monstro the whale is animated as a terrifying force of nature. That said, Pinocchio has some surprisingly dark material. The company’s first animated feature, Snow White, stuck close to the source material (apart from streamlining out the wicked witch’s earlier, redundant attempts to kill Snow White), but Pinocchio was its second feature, and decades of sweetening up children’s stories started here, with a puppet protagonist who’s naïve and easily led rather than malicious, and who behaves like a cheerful young child rather than an amoral id-monster. Walt Disney Animation has a longtime habit of basing animated movies on classic fairy tales and children’s novels, but redrafting them considerably to make them more whimsical, innocent, and sentimental. Most strikingly, he straight-up murders the Jiminy Cricket equivalent who tries to give him good advice, and is subsequently haunted by its ghost. He befriends Lampwick and sees him become a donkey, as in the film-but he also re-encounters donkey Lampwick later, just in time to watch him die of overwork. Later, she and the fox end up blind, lame, and starving, and Pinocchio-in spite of his own constant moral failings and repentances-laughs at them and tells them it serves them right. (Like a movie cop, killed by the villain one week from retirement.) Pinocchio bites off one of the cat’s paws, when she attacks him while dressed as a bandit, and she repays him by hanging him, leading to a morbid sequence where he’s menaced by black rabbit undertakers. He deliberately betrays his father and the good fairy over and over, including at one point when he’s behaved himself for a year and is literally one day away from becoming a real boy. Pinocchio is a selfish little beast, aggressive and violent and constantly defying authority. It originated as a newspaper serial, so it’s made up of short episodes, almost all of which involve death, mutilation, or some grotesque betrayal. But Collodi’s version is so much darker and more disturbing. Many of the basics we see in the movie are there-Pinocchio is carved from wood by an old man who wishes for a son, he comes to life, he runs away at the behest of a scheming fox and cat, he ends up in a puppet show, he goes to a place where boys enjoy themselves until they turn into donkeys, he rescues his creator from the belly of a giant fish, and he becomes a real boy. ![]() Tasha: So Nathan, have you read Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel The Adventures Of Pinocchio, the basis for Disney’s animated film? It’s an incredibly disturbing book. TWO DISSOLVE WRITERS KEEP THE PINOCCHIO CONVERSATION GOING…
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