Pinocchio (1940 film)

Pinocchio is a 1940 American animated musical fantasy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and released by RKO Radio Pictures. Loosely based on Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian children's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio, it is the studio's second animated feature film, as well as the third animated film overall produced by an American film studio, after Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Fleischer Studios' Gulliver's Travels (1939). With the voices of Cliff Edwards, Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Walter Catlett, Charles Judels, Evelyn Venable, and Frankie Darro, the film follows a wooden puppet, Pinocchio, who is created by an old woodcarver, Geppetto, and brought to life by a blue fairy. Wishing to become a real boy, Pinocchio must prove himself to be "brave, truthful, and unselfish." Along his journey, Pinocchio encounters several characters representing the temptations and consequences of wrongdoing, as a cricket named Jiminy, who takes the role of Pinocchio's conscience, attempts to guide him in matters of right and wrong.
The film was adapted by several storyboard artists from Collodi's book. The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, and the film's sequences were directed by Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, and Bill Roberts. Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation, giving realistic movement to vehicles and machinery as well as natural elements such as rain, water, lightning, smoke, and shadow. After premiering at the Center Theatre in New York City on February 7, 1940, Pinocchio was released in theatres on February 23, 1940.
Although it received critical acclaim and became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award — winning two for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song for "When You Wish Upon a Star" — it was initially a commercial failure, mainly due to World War II cutting off the European and Asian markets. It eventually made a profit after its 1945 rerelease, and is considered one of the greatest animated films ever made, with a 100% rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. The film and characters are still prevalent in popular culture, featuring at various Disney parks and other forms of entertainment. In 1994, Pinocchio was added to the United States National Film Registry for being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."[5]
In 2000, a live-action made-for-television semi-remake and musical film titled Geppetto, told from Geppetto's perspective, was released via ABC. A live-action remake of the same title directed by Robert Zemeckis was released in 2022 on Disney+.
== Plot ==
In late-19th century Italy, Jiminy Cricket arrives at the shop of a woodworker and toymaker named Geppetto, who creates a puppet he names Pinocchio. As he falls asleep, Geppetto wishes upon a star for Pinocchio to be a real boy. Late that night, the Blue Fairy visits the workshop and brings Pinocchio to life, although he remains a puppet. She informs him that if he proves himself to be brave, truthful, and unselfish, he will become a real boy. When Jiminy reveals himself, the Blue Fairy assigns him to be Pinocchio's conscience. Geppetto awakens upon hearing the commotion from Pinocchio falling, and is overjoyed to discover that he is alive and will become a real boy.
The next morning, while walking to school, Pinocchio is led astray by con artist fox Honest John and his sidekick Gideon the Cat. Honest John convinces him to join Stromboli's puppet show, despite Jiminy's protestations. Pinocchio becomes Stromboli's star attraction, but when he tries to go home, Stromboli locks him in a bird cage and leaves to tour the world with Pinocchio. After Jiminy unsuccessfully tries to free his friend, the Blue Fairy appears, and an anxious Pinocchio lies about what happened, causing his nose to grow. The Blue Fairy restores his nose and frees Pinocchio when he promises to make amends, but warns him that she can offer no further help.
Meanwhile, a mysterious Coachman hires Honest John to find disobedient and naughty boys for him to take to Pleasure Island, a notorious and infamous place. Honest John, despite the legal risks and the Coachman's implication of what happens to the boys, persuades Pinocchio to take a vacation on Pleasure Island. On the way to the island, Pinocchio befriends Lampwick, a delinquent boy. At Pleasure Island, without rules or authority to enforce their activity, Pinocchio, Lampwick, and many other boys soon engage in vices such as vandalism, fighting, smoking and drinking. Jiminy eventually finds Pinocchio in a bar smoking and playing pool with Lampwick, and the two have a falling out after Pinocchio defends Lampwick for his actions. As Jiminy tries leaving Pleasure Island, he discovers that the island hides a horrible curse that transforms the boys into donkeys after making "jackasses" of themselves, and they are sold by the Coachman into slave labor. Pinocchio witnesses Lampwick transform into a donkey, and with Jiminy's help, he flees before he can be fully transformed, though he still has a donkey's ears and tail.
Upon returning home, Pinocchio and Jiminy find Geppetto's workshop deserted, and obtain a letter from the Blue Fairy in the form of a dove, stating that Geppetto had sailed to Pleasure Island in search of Pinocchio. He was swallowed by a gigantic and vicious sperm whale called Monstro and is now trapped in its belly. Determined to rescue his father, Pinocchio jumps into the Mediterranean Sea with Jiminy and is soon swallowed by Monstro, where he reunites with Geppetto. Pinocchio devises a scheme to make Monstro sneeze and allow them to escape, but the whale chases them and destroys their raft with his tail. Pinocchio selflessly pulls Geppetto to safety in a cove just as Monstro crashes into it and Pinocchio is killed.
Back at home, Geppetto, Jiminy, Figaro, and Cleo mourn Pinocchio. Having succeeded in proving himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, Pinocchio is revived and turned into a real human boy by the Blue Fairy, much to everyone's joy. As the group celebrates, Jiminy steps outside to thank the Fairy and is rewarded with a solid gold badge that certifies him as an official conscience.
== Voice cast ==
* Dick Jones as Pinocchio, a wooden puppet carved by Geppetto and brought to life by the Blue Fairy.
** Jones also voiced Alexander, a boy who is turned into a donkey at Pleasure Island, but still talks.
* Cliff Edwards as Jiminy Cricket, a cricket who acts as Pinocchio's "conscience" and is the partial narrator of the story.
* Christian Rub as Geppetto, an elderly wood-carver and Pinocchio's creator, who wishes for him to become a real boy.
* Clarence Nash as Figaro, Geppetto's pet cat who is prone to sulk. Cleo, Geppetto's pet goldfish with a habit of being Figaro's counselor, is unvoiced. Figaro and Cleo were original characters not present in the original story, and were added to the script by the Disney team.[6] Nash also voices the rough house statue and makes the braying sounds for the donkeys on Pleasure Island, after the boys have been transformed into them.[7]
* Walter Catlett as "Honest" John Worthington Foulfellow, an anthropomorphic red fox con artist who swindles Pinocchio.
** Gideon the Cat, Honest John's mute anthropomorphic feline partner and sidekick who serves as comic relief. He was originally intended to be voiced by Mel Blanc, in his second work for Disney until his final work in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but the filmmakers instead went with a mute performance for the character.[8] However, Gideon's hiccups were provided by Blanc.[8]
* Charles Judels as Stromboli, a puppeteer who buys Pinocchio for a miserable amount of money from Honest John & Gideon and intends to force said Pinocchio to perform onstage to make money and use as "firewood" once he gets "too old" to perform. He speaks English with an Italian accent, and curses in Italian gibberish when angry. He is called "gypsy" by Honest John, likely due to his theatre and caravan always travelling, as well as other names like "rascal" and "faker".
** Judels also voiced The Coachman, the owner and operator of Pleasure Island.
* Evelyn Venable as the Blue Fairy, who brings Pinocchio to life and promises to turn him into a real boy if he proves himself brave, truthful, and selfless. Live-action references for the Blue Fairy were provided by Marge Champion, who served as the live-action reference for the titular heroine in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
* Frankie Darro as Lampwick, a boy who Pinocchio befriends on his way to Pleasure Island and is turned into a donkey for his mischief.
* Stuart Buchanan as the Carnival Barker, the announcer at Pleasure Island. In a book adaptation of the film, "Barker" is the Coachman's name or alias.
* Thurl Ravenscroft as Monstro, the sperm whale.[9] He swallows Pinocchio, Geppetto, Figaro, and Cleo, then tries to kill them after they escape from his belly by making him sneeze.
The voice cast was all uncredited, as was the practice at the time for many animated films.
== Production ==
=== Development ===
In September 1937, during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animator Norman Ferguson brought a translated version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian children's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio to the attention of Walt Disney. After reading the book, "Walt was busting his guts with enthusiasm," as Ferguson later recalled. Disney then commissioned storyboard artist Bianca Majolie to write a new story outline for the book, but after reading it, he felt her outline was too faithful.[10] Pinocchio was intended to be the studio's third feature, after Bambi (1942). However, due to difficulties with Bambi (adapting the story and animating the animals realistically), Disney announced that Bambi would be postponed while Pinocchio would move ahead in production. Ben Sharpsteen was then re-assigned to supervise the production while Jack Kinney was given directional reins.[11][10]
=== Writing and design ===
Unlike Snow White, which was a short story that the writers could expand and experiment with, Pinocchio was based on a novel with a very fixed, although episodic, story. Therefore, the story went through drastic changes before reaching its final incarnation.[8] In the original novel, Pinocchio is a cold, rude, ungrateful, inhuman brat that often repels sympathy and only learns his lessons the hard way.[12] The writers decided to modernize the character and depict him similar to Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy,[13] but equally as rambunctious as the puppet in the book. The story was still being developed in the early stages of animation.[12]
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ac/OLLIE1989.jpg/154px-OLLIE1989.jpg
Ollie Johnston
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Frank Thomas
Early scenes animated by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas show that Pinocchio's design was exactly like that of a real wooden puppet with a long pointed nose, a peaked cap and bare wooden hands.[8]
Early scenes animated by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston show that Pinocchio's design was exactly like a real wooden puppet with a long pointed nose, a peaked cap, and bare wooden hands.[14] Disney, however, was not impressed with the work that was being done on the film. He felt that no one could really sympathize with such a character and called for an immediate halt in production.[12][13] Fred Moore redesigned the character slightly to make him more appealing, but the design still retained a wooden feel.[15]
Young and upcoming animator Milt Kahl felt that Thomas, Johnston, and Moore were "rather obsessed with the idea of this boy being a wooden puppet" and felt that they should "forget that he was a puppet and get a cute little boy; you can always draw the wooden joints and make him a wooden puppet afterwards." Co-supervising director Hamilton Luske suggested to Kahl that he should demonstrate his beliefs by animating a test sequence.[16]
Kahl then showed Disney an animation test scene in which Pinocchio is underwater looking for his father.[17] From this scene, Kahl re-envisioned the character by making him look more like a real boy, with a child's Tyrolean hat and standard cartoon character four-fingered (or three and a thumb) hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves.[18] The only parts of Pinocchio that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms, legs, and little button wooden nose. Disney embraced Kahl's scene and immediately urged the writers to evolve Pinocchio into a more innocent, naïve, somewhat coy personality reflecting Kahl's design.[19]
However, Disney discovered that the new Pinocchio was too helpless and was far too often led astray by deceiving characters. Therefore, in the summer of 1938, Disney and his story team established the character of the cricket. Originally, the talking cricket was only a minor character whom Pinocchio abruptly killed by squashing with a mallet and who later returned as a ghost. Disney dubbed the cricket "Jiminy", and made him a character who would try to guide Pinocchio into the right decisions.[20] Once the character was expanded, he was depicted as a realistic cricket with toothed legs and waving antennae, but Disney wanted something more likable. Ward Kimball had spent several months animating two sequences—a soup-eating musical number and a bed-building sequence—in Snow White, which was cut from the film due to pacing reasons. Kimball was about to quit when Disney rewarded him for his work by promoting him to the supervising animator of Jiminy Cricket.[21] Kimball then conjured up the design for Jiminy Cricket, whom he described as a little man with an egg head and no ears.[22] Jiminy "was a cricket because we called him a cricket," Kimball later joked.[20]
=== Casting ===
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jackie_Kelk_Dick_Jones_Henry_Aldrich_circa_1943_1944.JPG|left|thumb|Dickie Jones (right, as an adult) voices Pinocchio in the film.
Due to the huge success of Snow White, Walt Disney wanted more famous voices for Pinocchio, which marked the first time an animated film had used celebrities as voice actors.[23] He cast popular singer Cliff Edwards, also known as "Ukulele Ike", as Jiminy Cricket.[24] Disney rejected the idea of having an adult play Pinocchio and insisted that the character be voiced by a real child. He cast 11-year-old child actor Dickie Jones, who had previously been in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).[25] He also cast Frankie Darro as Lampwick, Walter Catlett as "Honest" John Foulfellow the Fox, Evelyn Venable as the Blue Fairy, Charles Judels as both the villainous Stromboli and the Coachman, and Christian Rub as Geppetto, whose design was even a caricature of Rub.[26] Another actor voiced Geppetto originally, but Disney recast him with Rub after feeling that his voice was "too harsh".[27]
Another voice actor recruited was Mel Blanc, best remembered for voicing many of the characters in Warner Bros. cartoon shorts, including Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. Blanc recorded the voice of Gideon the Cat in sixteen days. However, it was eventually decided that Gideon would be mute, so all of Blanc's recorded dialogue was subsequently deleted except for a solitary hiccup,[28] which was heard three times in the finished film.
=== Animation ===
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b5/Jiminy_Cricket.png/200px-Jiminy_Cricket.png
Jiminy Cricket
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Stromboli, primarily animated by Bill Tytla
Animation on the film began in January 1938, but work on Pinocchio's animation was discontinued as the writers sought to re-work his characterization and the film's narrative structure. However, animation on the film's supporting characters started in April 1938.[14] Animation would not resume again with the revised story until September.[19]
During the production of the film, story artist Joe Grant formed a character model department, which would be responsible for building three-dimensional clay models of the characters in the film, known as maquettes. These models were then given to the staff to observe how a character should be drawn from any given angle desired by the artists.[17] The model makers also built working models of Geppetto's elaborate cuckoo clocks designed by Albert Hurter, as well as Stromboli's gypsy wagon and wooden cage, and the Coachman's carriage. However, owing to the difficulty of animating a realistic moving vehicle, the artists filmed the carriage maquettes on a miniature set using stop motion animation. Then, each frame of the animation was transferred onto animation cels using an early version of a Xerox. The cels were then painted on the back and overlaid on top of background images with the cels of the characters to create the completed shot on the rostrum camera. Like Snow White, live-action footage was shot for Pinocchio with the actors playing the scenes in pantomime, supervised by Luske.[29] Rather than tracing, which would result in stiff unnatural movement, the animators used the footage as a guide for animation by studying human movement and then incorporating some poses into the animation (though slightly exaggerated).[29]
Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation, led by Joshua Meador. In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create everything that moves other than the characters—vehicles, machinery, and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water, as well as the fantasy or science-fiction type effects like the pixie dust of Peter Pan (1953). The influential abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, who mainly worked on Fantasia (1940), contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand.[30] Effects animator Sandy Strother kept a diary about his year-long animation of the water effects, which included splashes, ripples, bubbles, waves, and the illusion of being underwater. To help give depth to the ocean, the animators put more detail into the waves on the water surface in the foreground, and put in less detail as the surface moved further back. After the animation was traced onto cels, the assistant animators would trace it once more with blue and black pencil leads to give the waves a sculptured look.[31] To save time and money, the splashes were kept impressionistic. These techniques enabled Pinocchio to be one of the first animated films to have highly realistic effects animation. Ollie Johnston called it "one of the finest things the studio's ever done, as Frank Thomas said, 'The water looks so real a person can drown in it, and they do.'"[32]
== Music ==
Main article: Pinocchio (soundtrack)
The songs in Pinocchio were composed by Leigh Harline with lyrics by Ned Washington. Harline and Paul J. Smith composed the incidental music score.[33] The climactic Whale Chase was co-composed by Edward H. Plumb. The soundtrack was first released on February 9, 1940.[33] Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish Upon A Star", became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as the theme song of The Walt Disney Company itself.[34] The soundtrack won an Academy Award for Best Original Score.[34]
== Themes ==
link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pinochio2_1940.jpg|left|thumb|Commentator Nicholas Sammond considers Pinocchio to be a metaphor for American child rearing in the mid-20th century.
M. Keith Booker considers the film to be the most down-to-earth of the Disney animated films despite its theme song and magic, and notes that the film's protagonist has to work to prove his worth, which he remarked seemed "more in line with the ethos of capitalism" than most of the Disney films.[35] Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh believe that the male protagonists of films like Pinocchio and Bambi (1942) were purposefully constructed by Disney to appeal to both boys and girls.[36] Mark I. Pinsky said that it is "a simple morality tale—cautionary and schematic—ideal for moral instruction, save for some of its darker moments", and noted that the film is a favorite of parents of young children.[37]
Nicolas Sammond argues that the film is "an apt metaphor for the metaphysics of midcentury American child-rearing" and that the film is "ultimately an assimilationist fable".[38] He considered it to be the central Disney film and the most strongly middle class, intended to relay the message that indulging in "the pleasures of the working class, of vaudeville, or of pool halls and amusement parks, led to a life as a beast of burden". For Sammond, the purpose of Pinocchio is to help convey to children the "middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance, naturalized as the experience of the most average American".[39]
Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who saw the film in theaters in 1940, called the film superior to Collodi's novel in its depiction of children and growing up. "The Pinocchio in the film is not the unruly, sulking, vicious, devious (albeit still charming) marionette that Collodi created. Neither is he an innately evil, doomed-to-calamity child of sin. He is, rather, both lovable and loved. Therein lies Disney's triumph. His Pinocchio is a mischievous, innocent and very naive little wooden boy. What makes our anxiety over his fate endurable is a reassuring sense that Pinocchio is loved for himself – and not for what he should or shouldn't be. Disney has corrected a terrible wrong. Pinocchio, he says, is good; his "badness" is only a matter of inexperience," and also that "Pinocchio's wish to be a real boy remains the film's underlying theme, but "becoming a real boy" now signifies the wish to grow up, not the wish to be good."[40]
Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson has spoken about the film in his lectures extensively, citing it as an example of "the manner in which great mythological and archetypal themes inform and permeate narrative."[41]
Category:1940 cartoons
Category:Walt Disney Productions Cartoons