The choice to focus on the Blue Fairy as lost lover and mother is, I think, responsible in great part for the intensity of the book, which never strays for long from being an allegory of life as a voyage from maternal matrix or womb to dissolution or tomb. And the Blue Fairy, as in Manganelli’s reading of her, is a powerfully protean figure, sometimes a silly, gum-chewing, big-breasted American girl named Bluebell, sometimes the lovely ethereal presence of the little girl with blue hair, sometimes a terrifying inhuman monster. All of her guises come together in her final meeting with Pinocchio who, on the verge of death, finally understands their bond as monsters, as beings excluded from full human existence, he as a piece of wood at heart, she as the lack that women have represented through the ages. It is a wonderful book, made even more enjoyable by a knowledge of the original tale’s complexities that are animated once more in this thoroughly postmodern Pinocchio.
PINOCCHIO IN FILM
I mentioned Roberto Benigni’s 2002 movie of Pinocchio earlier, but Benigni is only one of many filmmakers who have wanted to bring Collodi’s tale to the screen, including Federico Fellini and Francis Ford Coppola. Neither ever did, although Fellini’s final film, The Voice of the Moon, starring Benigni, has overt allusions to the puppet’s story. Other directors did make their versions of Pinocchio, whether in animation, with live actors, or a mix of the two, and there are at least fourteen English-language films based on the tale, not to mention the Italian, French, Russian, German, Japanese, and many other versions for the big screen and for television. Japanese anime cartoons owe a particular debt to Pinocchio, for Astroboy, one of the most popular figures of the genre, is based on the Italian puppet. Although Collodi did not provide a detailed description either of the appearance of his characters or of the settings, from its birth in serial form the tale has stimulated an extraordinarily rich illustrative tradition that in turn has nourished numerous cinematographic representations.
In the English-speaking world at least, no filmmaker so far approaches the achievement of Walt Disney, who in 1940 released the animated version of Pinocchio that has continued for more than sixty years to condition our collective knowledge of and response to the puppet. Critics are in agreement about the technical splendors of the film, but it did not enjoy a strongly positive reception when it was first released, and there are still very differing readings of it today. The cover of the sixtieth anniversary edition of the video tells us that it is Disney’s “immortal masterpiece” and quotes TV Guide’s assessment of it as “arguably the greatest animated feature of all time!” Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs had already achieved a huge advancement in animation; Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it the greatest film ever made, for it showed that cartoons could represent any visuals a director might conceive of, thus creating a vast new realm of cinematic creativity and freedom. Pinocchio, along with Fantasia, built on the achievements of Snow White and the collaboration of hundreds of artists and technicians brought together in a kind of “collective creative epiphany,” to use Chicago film critic Roger Ebert’s words. Ebert provides good information about the specific technical innovations of Disney’s film: for one, the breaking of the frame, by means of which it is implied that there is space outside the screen, a technique of “regular” live-action films not used in animation until Disney’s people made it possible. Thus in the exciting sequence in which Pinocchio and Geppetto are expelled by the whale Monstro’s sneeze, then drawn back in, and then again expelled, there is a palpable sense of the presence of the whale offscreen to the right.[6]
Audiences are probably much more taken with the wonderful score, the strikingly humanlike characters (with perfectly chosen voices), and the allusions to recognizable types from high as well as popular culture than with the film’s technical innovations, which they may or may not notice. As for its music, we remember that the film won Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, the unforgettable “When You Wish Upon a Star.” And, as for characters, by paring down the large cast of characters in the original book to a few well-drawn (in all senses of the word) good and bad types—the kindly Geppetto; the adorable innocent Pinocchio; the all-American hayseed Jiminy Cricket; the luscious Blue Fairy; Geppetto’s darling, very humanized pet cat Figaro and flirty pet fish Cleo; pitted against the rapacious fox Honest John; the gross puppet master Stromboli; the sadistic Dickensian Foulfellow; the terrifying whale Monstro—Disney offers a genuine morality tale in which Good triumphs over Evil, according to the fairly saccharine code expressed primarily by the Blue Fairy: “Prove yourself brave, useful and truthful”; “A body who won’t be good may just as well be made of wood”; “Give a bad boy enough room and he’ll soon make a jackass of himself”; “When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are”; and so on. It may be that children continue to enjoy the film because, as Ebert states, “all children want to become real and doubt they can,” so that they identify strongly with Pinocchio’s wish to become a real boy.
Or, I would suggest that it may be that young viewers respond most to the film’s deeply frightening aspects that have something of the primal about them, as do classical fairy tales that enthrall kids over and over. I myself remember being haunted for a very long time by the wicked stepmother and the horrible witch of Snow White, and by the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I did not “identify with” Snow White or Dorothy, though; in fact I wanted to be a witch, and I now think that what I really wanted was her power over others and her deliciously transgressive way of life. It may be that something like this attraction to the transgressive pulls children into Pinocchio’s story, not because they want him or themselves to be “real” but because they relish his brushes with danger and death, vicariously thrilling to experiences that are otherwise out of their reach.
In a richly informative book containing marvelous illustrations, Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney, Robin Allan describes the less than sunny aspects of Disney’s Pinocchio in a chapter called, appropriately enough, “The Dark World of Pinocchio.” Although I think that Allan is wrong when he calls Collodi’s book a work of “homiletic Victorian values,” he is right on the mark when he writes that “the darkness of [a complex and frightening] world forms the central bleakness of the film and this is, for all its adaptation, the strongest link between Disney and Collodi.” By “all its adaptation,” Allan is referring to the ways in which Collodi’s story had already been mediated by earlier bowdlerlized versions of the book (alterations and adaptations that had, over the years, shortened the tale and often removed some of its darker episodes), versions that in turn had provided the basis for a play by Yasha Frank that was performed in Los Angeles in 1937 and subsequently published in 1939. Frank’s Pinocchio was an innocent, incapable of promoting mischief, unlike Collodi’s puppet, who has a seemingly natural attraction to transgressive and delinquent behavior.
Disney followed adaptations much more than the original, as he modified the sadism and violence in order to bring to the screen a lovable, cuddly Pinocchio. Nonetheless, as Allan writes, “the film is dark in content and in presentation, with seventy-six of its eighty-eight minutes taking place at night or under water.” The Disney movie is an odd blend of its European origin and American elements—in the latter case, the most important of which is the Will Rogers–type hobo, Jiminy Cricket—and its Old World cultural referents dominate the ultimately unsuccessful Americanization of the tale: for example, Commedia dell’Arte characters upon which the Fox and his stupid sidekick Cat are based; the Dickensian Foulfellow who shanghais Pinocchio to Pleasure Island; and the setting itself, which has the look of a Bavarian or Austrian Alpine village, the result of the work of Swedish artist Gustaf Tenggren who came to the Disney studios a few years before the film was made.
One of the most disturbing Old World characterizations in Disney’s film is that of the greedy puppet master Stromboli, who is portrayed as a curious hybrid, part gypsy, p
art Jewish, in spite of his stereotypically broad Italian accent. Collodi’s puppet master, Fire-Eater “did indeed look scary…. But deep down he really wasn’t a bad man,” nor does he have any sort of marked ethnic or racial identity. From an anti-Semitic perspective, Stromboli’s gross facial features and his long black beard are recognizably Jewish, as is his excessive love of wealth. Critic William Paul has suggested that Stromboli is “a burlesque of a Hollywood boss…. Disney’s own relationship to the Hollywood power structure was always a difficult one.” Richard Schickel was the first critic to bring a clear charge of anti-Semitism to the film in his 1968 book Walt Disney, although some of Disney’s closest colleagues were Jewish and insisted that they were unaware of any prejudice on his part. Stromboli does disturb a viewer today, however, for it is simply impossible to ignore the anti-Semitic implications of his characterization. And it is all the more disturbing when one thinks of the period in which the film was made and the anti-Semitism that was being spread like a plague in Europe by Hitler’s Third Reich.
Another queasy-making (to return to Denby’s comment), if much less deeply disturbing, characterization is that of Disney’s Blue Fairy. Like the few other female presences in the film—Cleo, Geppetto’s flirty, long-lashed fish, or the dancing girl puppets in Stromboli’s Marionette Theater, who wear various national costumes as if they are contestants in a Miss World beauty pageant—the Blue Fairy is an utterly stereotypical feminine figure whose role, although ostensibly central in making Pinocchio come to life as a puppet and again as a real boy, is actually quite marginal in terms of actual screen time and impact. Completely antithetical to Collodi’s deeply mysterious and manipulative Blue Fairy, Disney’s is a 1930s “glamour girl” who is a solid, shapely human presence rather than an ethereal apparition. She is a deus ex machina who enters the scene early on to grant “good Geppetto” his wish made upon a star that the puppet become “real.” She utters the magic words “Little puppet wake, the gift of life is thine,” and the already humanoid and very cuddly puppet Pinocchio begins to move and talk, thus completely eliding the line between the human and nonhuman, unlike Collodi’s tale in which Pinocchio’s emergence from a talking piece of wood emphasizes his nonhuman status (as do the earliest illustrations to the book). Nor does Disney’s fairy function in any sense as a mother figure; she certainly does not look motherly at all but has the appearance more like that of a Hollywood starlet. Her sole function in Disney’s version is as a magic presence that can get Pinocchio out of apparently hopeless fixes; this means that she flits in and out of the film with no deeper resonance than an inanimate magic wand or potion would have. Her single goal is to get Pinocchio to be a good, obedient boy, back in the warm protection of Geppetto’s fatherly space, where mothers are simply not needed, just as femaleness in any form (Cleo the fish, the seductive marionettes) is shown to be primarily decorative, the equivalent of the dumb blond or “bimbo” of Hollywood manufacture.
If my comments on Disney’s Pinocchio seem to be primarily negative, I wish to temper that impression by stating that in fact I find the film to be a remarkable technical achievement and a truly fascinating work. It is not only highly engaging and entertaining; it is also a rich cultural document, due mainly to its “hidden” or subtextual elements that reveal, perhaps unwittingly, artistic and social models, prejudices, and stereotypes of the period in which it was made that were both collective and specific to Disney. (This, I think, is also the case with Collodi’s tale, indeed with any work that resonates more deeply than lesser works of merely superficial appeal.) If the subtexts generated by Stromboli and the Blue Fairy suggest the negative Jewish and female models that had thoroughly permeated American culture and society by the era in which Disney was making his film (the late 1930s), there is, on the other hand, an element introduced very early on in the film that I find charmingly yet not at all simplistically positive. It is one that in fact transcends historical and cultural prejudices and reaches into the heart of artistic creativity.
Just as some literary works are meta-literary—that is, they contain writing about writing itself, and about their own themes and structures—so too films can be and often are meta-filmic. A famous example is Fellini’s 8 1/2, in which a director is trying to make a film that ends up being the film we are watching. Animated features are not often thought of as meta-filmic, yet Disney’s Pinocchio is just that. It is an animated film in which the main character is precisely a nonhuman who is animated, thus becoming a simulated “human.” This theme is highlighted very strikingly in the lengthy sequences in Geppetto’s cottage that focus on the numerous clocks and toys that he has carved, which all depict simulated human animation, thus crossing the boundary between the human and the nonhuman. In Geppetto’s workshop we see what is in effect a pre-filmic world of animation in which little carved mechanical figures are made to move, just as drawn figures will be made to move on the screen.
The anthropomorphic characterizations of animals—Figaro the cat, Cleo the fish, the Fox, and first and foremost, Jiminy Cricket—represent another crossing of lines, this time between the animal or insect and the human. Puppetry, the dominant technique of animation inscribed into the story, is, of course, embodied in Pinocchio himself, but in addition we have Stromboli’s marionettes, which function as another layer of self-conscious commentary on the animation of objects in human form.
With Pinocchio, Disney and his team of dedicated artists were not only creating simulated humans on-screen; they were also revealing something of the fascination that such animation exercises perhaps as much on its creators as on those who enjoy the fruits of their labors. However, there is a dark side to this urge to create life (even if only simulated life). Geppetto is the artist as benevolent God; there are no more charming scenes than those in which his many humanoid creations come to life, or those in which we witness his delight in his “son,” Pinocchio, even before the puppet has been given independent voice and movement by the Blue Fairy. Stromboli, however, is the evil puppet master God who creates the illusion of life only for personal gain and glory. The ancient theme of the dangers of hubristic creativity hovers around this film, but there is also inscribed into it the sheer joy of creation that seeks to animate lifeless things and to endow all objects and animals with such “human” qualities as the capacity to love and to live with conscious pleasure and direction.
FUTURISTIC (AND FUTURE) PINOCCHIOS
The fascinating question of what constitutes the boundary between humans and non- or post-humans is central to Spielberg’s 2001 film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. At the beginning of this essay I quoted from a largely negative review of the film by David Denby in The New Yorker. Other reviews, however, among them Geoffrey O’Brien’s in The New York Review of Books, were more positive and brought out issues related to some of those that I have discussed in my consideration of Pinocchio. In addition to the film’s explicit references to the tale Pinocchio—the human mother reads the puppet’s story to her robot or “mecha” son, who then decides he wants to be human and, upon his expulsion from the home, has a series of Pinocchio-like negative adventures as he searches for the Blue Fairy—it is possible to read the film, like Disney’s Pinocchio, as another meta-film.
Thus O’Brien writes, “A.I. is a meditation on its own components; the technical means that make possible the mechanical child are as one with the means used to make the film…. Now that we have the technology what are we going to use it for?” This “technology” of creation generates some of the same ethical and philosophical concerns that now whirl around the advances in science that permit babies to be created in test tubes and animals to be cloned.
In the original Collodi tale, in Disney’s film, and in A.I., the puppet (or robot) is created by Godlike fathers as a child figure intended to serve the needs, material or emotional as they may be, of the parent. Collodi’s Geppetto wants his puppet to help him make a living; Disney’s Geppetto wants his puppet to give him companionship and love; and Spielber
g’s mecha, David, is created specifically and uniquely in order to love his human parents unconditionally. Geppetto is a craftsman, allied to the tradition of poeisis or creativity to which artists belong, while the mecha’s creator, Professor Hobby, is a scientist (although a “poetic” one who wants to make a robot who can “chase down his dreams”). Nonetheless, they are, artists or scientists, all figures of the male creator who appropriates the procreativity of the maternal realm as they single-handedly “give birth to” their “sons,” effectively excluding women from their worlds except in highly idealized and symbolic, rather than active, roles.
In A.I., when an associate of the apparently benign designer of mechas, Professor Hobby (a Geppetto stand-in), makes what critic J. Hoberman in Sight and Sound calls “an obscure moral objection” to Hobby’s creation of “a robot child with a love that will never end,” Hobby’s reply is: “Didn’t God create Adam to love him?” Hoberman comments, “Yes, of course, and look what happened to him.” In fact, the mecha David is also expelled from Eden, and he futilely looks for the fictional character Blue Fairy to make him a “real boy” so that his mother will want him back. Eden regained is an impossible goal, however, and the most David can have is one perfect day with a reconstituted simulacrum of his mother.
In my reading of Collodi’s tale and its many “heirs” in subsequent fictional and filmic works, I have sought to bring out elements that make of the story of Pinocchio much more than a simplistic lesson in the importance of obedience and conformity. The ever valid question of how and to what end human beings are created and shaped is rendered even more complex by a consideration of the role of the symbolic dimension of the feminine as it complicates what is and remains in most cultures and most eras a fundamentally patriarchal view of creation.