Product: Pinocchio
Rating: 4.0
I must be one of the only people in the world who only really likes Disney's "Pinocchio" instead of loves it
SPOILERS FOLLOWThere are many, many things to love about Walt Disney's 1940 animated film "Pinocchio." The story boasts excellent, fully fleshed-out characters, the songs, including "When You Wish Upon A Star" and "I Got No Strings On Me" are some of the greatest numbers ever in a Disney production, and the movie presents at least five villains, if one includes Monstro. Yet, I cannot love this movie unreservedly.With the vocal talents of Dickie Jones, Cliff Edwards, and Christian Rub, "Pinocchio" is mostly phenomenal, though with some major differences from the original tale by Carlo Collodi. For starters, both the cricket (according to Collodi, the animal was not given a proper name) and Pinocchio are immediately at harsh odds with each other. Walt Disney also takes the liberty of significantly toning down Pinocchio's bratty rudeness from the book. While the story and characters around him are intriguing, Walt Disney's re-conceived Pinocchio is actually a fairly boring hero.I always felt somewhat cheated by Pinocchio's being essentially a completed puppet when Jiminy Cricket first comes into Gepetto's shop. A montage of Gepetto carving the wood for him(laughing wood, no less) would have made more of a connection between the characters from the outset. Walt Disney did make a powerful compromise by having Gepetto paint a smile onto Pinocchio. By painting the smile, Gepetto is the author of Pinocchio's personality and the creative 'father' of the puppet, if not the literal 'father' of the would-be boy.The movie is buoyed by villains who are unquestionably slippery and evil. The fox and cat are slippery charmers who smoothly deliver the unsuspecting Pinocchio over to the svengali Stromboli. Stromboli is very literally a puppetmaster, and the movie expertly massages the creative possibilities for outright horror that exist within a story about a puppet who wants to be a flesh-and-blood boy. Finally, the coachman on the Pleasure Island excursion is the most extreme of all villains in the movie, a devil who oversees the transformation of young boys into mindless donkeys. Symbolically, then, here Pinocchio sees the absolute worst side of his most cherished wish. Basically, becoming a genuine boy also means experiencing genuine human cruelty and mortal and spiritual danger.I will always miss the more rambunctious side of Pinocchio that Walt Disney chooses to ignore, and that decision makes this movie a little weaker than it could have been. Still, it is an expertly rendered adaptation.