The Transformations of Pinocchio
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Of the half-dozen or so films that turned Walt Disney, in the public’s mind, from the father of Mickey Mouse to the creator of the animated fairy-tale feature—thereby making his work a fixture in the imaginative life of almost every American child—"Pinocchio" (1940) feels like the odd one out. Many people say it is their least favorite. It is surely the most frightening. Go to anyone you know who was in grammar school in the nineteen-forties and fifties and ask, What was the Disney movie that scared you the most? Was it "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" (1937), where the evil queen falls off a cliff to her death? (Dr. Benjamin Spock once wrote that all the seats in the vast auditorium of Radio City Music Hall had to be reupholstered because so many children wet their pants while watching the film.) Well, what about "Dumbo" (1941), where the baby elephant has to watch as his mother is whipped and chained, howling for her child? O.K., what about "Bambi" (1942), where the fawn’s mother is shot to death a few feet away from him? You can’t beat that, can you?
But, for some reason, "Pinocchio" does. Perhaps the answer lies not in any one scene but in the movie’s over-all bleakness. Robin Allan, in his beautiful book "Walt Disney and Europe" (1999), reproduces what he calls an "atmosphere sketch" for "Pinocchio," by the Disney artist Gustaf Tenggren, showing the puppet locked in a cage, just after he has been kidnapped by an itinerant puppeteer. Other marionettes hang from the ceiling on strings, as if they had been lynched. Pinocchio alone seems to be alive, but he stares straight ahead, expressionless. At first glance, he looks almost serene. Then you inspect the drawing more closely and realize that the reason his face is blank is that he is numb with fear, like someone in a horror movie. Danger and death surround this small creature throughout the film. As Allan points out, seventy-six of "Pinocchio" ’s eighty-eight minutes—that’s eighty-six per cent—take place at night or under water.
If the film is unsettling, consider the novel it was based on, Carlo Collodi’s "Adventures of Pinocchio" (1883). The tale begins with a lethal weapon: under blows from an axe, the pine log that will become Pinocchio cries out, "Ouch! you’ve hurt me!" Soon afterward, the woodworker Geppetto starts fashioning the log into a puppet, which he calls Pinocchio: pino, in Italian, meaning pine, and occhio, meaning eye, one of the first parts of Pinocchio that Geppetto liberates from within the log. Next comes the nose, which, the moment Geppetto has finished it, starts to grow to an enormous length. Geppetto tries to prune it back, "but the more he cut and shortened it, the longer that impudent nose became." This nose will become Pinocchio’s trademark feature, and the combined comedy and cruelty that attend its birth can be said to stand for Collodi’s novel as a whole: Geppetto got Pinocchio by cutting, and for most of the remainder of the tale Pinocchio cuts him—mocks him, runs away from him.
It’s not an even trade, though. Pinocchio, for all his naughtiness, suffers terribly. Early on, at home alone, he lies back in a chair, propping his feet against the room’s brazier. He then falls asleep, and as a result his feet are burned off. When Geppetto returns home, he bursts into tears and lifts the puppet to his breast. Pinocchio hangs on for dear life. He can no longer stand up. His legs are smoking stumps. The drawing of this scene (by the excellent Enrico Mazzanti) in the novel’s first edition is hard to look at.
Geppetto, in creating Pinocchio, hopes that the puppet will perform in public to support him in his old age, for he is very poor. But when Pinocchio, not long after his creation, is on his way to school, he discovers that a puppet show has come to town, which sounds like more fun. He cannot resist temptation; he lacks a conscience. As veterans of the Disney version know, his conscience is outsourced to the figure of Jiminy Cricket. But in the Collodi novel Pinocchio kills the wise Cricket—throws a mallet at him, mashing his guts against the wall—when the creature tells him that he should go to school. Pinocchio pays for his truancy. After the puppet show, he encounters two scoundrels, the Fox and the Cat, who conspire to steal his money and hang him by the neck from an oak tree.
The film’s dark side reflects some of the book’s outlandish cruelty, but in many other ways Disney transformed the original. For instance, Pinocchio’s desire to be a "real boy," so central to the film, emerges only fitfully in the book. The same is true of his nose’s habit of growing when he tells a lie, a trait so famous that it’s now part of our culture’s iconography. (There’s a long-nosed emoji for lying, and the Washington Post’s fact checker logs the mendacity of politicians’ speeches on a scale of "two Pinocchios," "three Pinocchios," and so on.) Collodi’s Pinocchio certainly tells a lot of lies, but his nose often grows when he hasn’t lied, and he often lies without his nose growing.
"Seldom has a work of literature been so overshadowed by its celluloid adaptation," John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna write in the introduction to their new translation of "The Adventures of Pinocchio" (Penguin Classics). "This is a book with a mission: to rescue Pinocchio," they declare. They want us to see Collodi’s work not just as a children’s story but also, maybe primarily, as a part of "the corpus of nineteenth-century novels of social denunciation," and they urge us to recognize its puppet hero as being, for Italy, what Don Quixote is for Spain, "one of those rare fictional characters in whom an entire people seem to be able to make out their reflection." But you don’t have to be an Italian to identify with Pinocchio. For many audiences worldwide, he is the spirit of disobedience. No sooner is he born than he establishes his independence from his creator, Geppetto. Not long after that, he also, in a sense, parts ways with Collodi, whose original conception was very different from the finished book. Since then, Pinocchio has continually refused to be tied down, roaming freely across the world’s visual culture, always different but always recognizably himself.
Carlo Collodi (1826-90) was the eldest of ten children born to a couple—the father a cook, the mother a seamstress—working in the service of a Florentine marquess named Ginori Lisci. The growing brood was apparently too much for them, and the boy lived for a time with his mother’s family in the village of Collodi, outside Florence. (It was from that town that, when he was grown, he took his pen name. His given name was Carlo Lorenzini.) His parents’ employer took an interest in him, however, and arranged for him to get an education. Carlo first went to a seminary, in preparation for a career in the Church. Then, deciding that he did not have the makings of a priest, he transferred to another good school. At this time, when much of Italy was impoverished and illiterate, it was rare for someone of Collodi’s social position, the child of servants, to receive a classical education, and it was this mixed background, both sophisticated and "street," that makes "Pinocchio" so piquant.
In his late teens, Collodi went to work at a respected bookstore in Florence and began to mix with the intelligentsia. In his mid-twenties, he co-founded a satirical daily. In the following decades, he reviewed books, music, and theatre, and produced a lot of political polemics. He also wrote a novel and six comic plays. In other words, he became the sort of literary Jack-of-all-trades that historians are apt to call a "journalist." He was also usually holding down a day job in the civil service. The fact that he never married or had children—he is said to have disliked children—no doubt made it easier for him to do all this.
Collodi was a committed republican. Twice, in 1848 and then in 1859, he signed up to fight for the Risorgimento, the movement that sought to liberate the Italian peninsula from the foreign powers that, for most of his lifetime, ruled it. Like many radicals, however, Collodi was not happy with the outcome of the Risorgimento: a constitutional monarchy with a weak king, Victor Emmanuel II, who cared more about the rich and the middle class than about Italy’s millions of poor people. Even though the nation was now nominally ruled by a central government, its many parts did not have shared values, or even a shared language. In his forties, Collodi contributed to an important Italian dictionary, one of the many efforts to get Italians to agree on a single standard language rather than continue speaking local dialects that people fifty miles away might not understand. As reformers sized up the task of educating the populace of this new country, Collodi started writing for children. First, he did a translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales and a number of instructional storybooks. Then, in 1880, a publisher in Rome persuaded him to contribute to a fledgling newspaper for children, Giornale per i Bambini, and he launched what was to be that publication’s best-known serial, "La Storia di un Burattino," or "The Story of a Puppet," the puppet being Pinocchio.
It has been suggested that Pinocchio, his newly fashioned parts flapping this way and that, was Collodi’s symbol of his homeland—nominally unified but in fact governed locally, not by agreed-upon, let alone just, laws. The book features not a single public official—policeman, jailer, judge—who is not either stupid or corrupt or both. When Pinocchio complains to the authorities that the Fox and the Cat have stolen his money, the police come and arrest not the Fox and the Cat but Pinocchio. The judge (a gorilla) sends Pinocchio to prison for having been such a fool. An amnesty is later declared in the district, but Pinocchio is told that he alone will not be released, because an amnesty is only for real criminals. Tuscans have a reputation for being rough and gruff, and Collodi—habitually wry, sardonic, iconoclastic—was an excellent representative of his province. It is no surprise that he did not send his hero off into a world of kindness.
The stories appeared, off and on, during the second half of 1881. Taken together, they form less than half the book we now call "Pinocchio"—fifteen chapters out of thirty-six. This section ends when the Fox and the Cat hang Pinocchio:
A strong north wind had come up, which, blowing and howling furiously, slammed the poor hanged puppet back and forth, causing him to swing violently like the clapper of a joyously ringing bell. And that swinging caused him the sharpest spasms while the slip noose, tightening more and more around his throat, was choking him.
Little by little his eyes grew dim; and although he felt death approaching, he nonetheless still continued to hope that at any moment some compassionate soul would pass by and help him. But when, after waiting and waiting, he saw that nobody showed up, absolutely nobody, then he remembered his poor father again . . . and almost at death’s door, he stuttered.
"Oh, dear father! . . . if only you were here!"
And he had no breath to say anything else. He closed his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched out his legs, and, after giving a great shudder, he remained there as though frozen stiff.
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