Anyway, the movie was infinitely less scary and more enjoyable this time around. I'm not exactly ready to remove the distinction that it is my least favorite Disney movie, however. At least, not yet. 51 movies from now, I should have a better idea.
It's actually quite interesting to look back on this and other films that I haven't seen since my childhood, because my perceptions of them seem to have been really skewed. Whereas I remembered this film being one disturbing scene to the next (Pinocchio encountering a creepy fox, being stuffed into a birdcage, turning into a half-donkey, and then getting swallowed by a whale), it plays out pretty different in reality. Yes those moments still exist and yes there is a part of me that is still very uncomfortable with them, but there's a lot more to the story in between that helps to remove the stranger imagery of the film.
Something that does stand out about this film and Snow White to a somewhat lesser extent is the very drastic difference between early and modern children's films. These stories don't feel incredibly censored, a clear indication of a societal shift that we have seen in the seventy-something years that have elapsed since Disney first set out to create animated features. For example, I can't imagine a modern Disney movie showing young boys drinking and smoking cigars at a place called "Pleasure Island," so there you go.
On the other side of the coin, I really do appreciate the message that Pinocchio pushes about honesty, bravery, and selflessness that I have somehow discounted all these years. I, of course, remembered the theme about honesty telling the truth (it's hard to forget the image of Pinocchio's nose turning into a tree branch, as I've said, the creepy images were burned into my adolescent mind), but the overall idea of Pinocchio learning to be brave and selfless was apparently lost on me until now.
All of this brings me to Jiminy Cricket, who I had always thought of as a narrator on the outside of the "real" story, when he is at least as integral to the story as Pinocchio himself. Sidebar: this idea of Jiminy being a narrator-type may have come from repeated viewing of Mickey's Christmas Carol over the years (a holiday favorite), where Jiminy is the Ghost of Christmas Past. As I watched Pinocchio, I even thought to myself that this movie could just as likely have been called Jiminy Cricket, because it's as much about Pinocchio becoming a boy as it is Jiminy becoming a faithful adviser and conscience. Lest we not forget that when Pinocchio lies to the Blue Fairy, Jiminy quietly tells Pinocchio to leave out his own lack of guidance (i.e. the part when he abandoned Pinocchio after seeing him in the Marionette show).
I'm going to geek out for a minute and say that I did some research on the history of Pinocchio that I'd like to share. Perhaps the most interesting tidbit I have to offer is that Jiminy was created specifically for the film, which is based on the story The Adventures of Pinocchio. I guess what surprises me about that is the mere fact that as I watched the movie I started to feel there was a compelling case for the movie to be named after the cricket sidekick. A couple of other cool facts include Walt Disney's insistence that famous actors voice these characters, which was a groundbreaking move in animated film-making, and that this was to have been the third Disney animated feature behind Bambi, but ultimately became the second due to production delays on Bambi, which would actually become the fourth animated feature.
Finally, I'd like to just comment on a few of the other characters that pop up in Pinocchio, many of whom are antagonists. I am starting to think that this movie may have the most villains of all the Disney animated classics, or at least the highest number of antagonistic schemes, because most movies have one "big bad" with a few cronies, this one has a lot of separate evil going on. Honest John is a truly frightening character, which I have to think is a combination of the voice acting and the mere animation of him. There's something really unsettling about an anthropomorphic fox, right? Well, I certainly think so. The Stromboli character really stood out to me, because he feels the most contemporary to me. He's all about making money at the cost of others and then casting them aside when he's through with them (cue creepy scene of wooden puppet remains). He's the corporate monster of the movie, I guess. Then there's Lampwick, the rowdy kid Pinocchio meets on Pleasure Island, who is all sorts of misguided. I can't even say which out of these villianous characters is the worst.
To end on a more positive note, who doesn't love Cleo and Figaro?
Next week brings me to the first of the films I have not yet seen, Fantasia, which I have admittedly seen clips of, but never the whole thing together.
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