PINOCCHIO
A film review by Frank Maloney
Copyright 1992 Frank Maloney
PINOCCHIO is a film from the Walt Disney Company. It was first released in 1940 and has been restored and rereleased this summer. Directed by Ben Sharpsteen. Voices by Dick Jones, Cliff Edwards, and Evelyn Venable. The story is loosely based on the AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO by Collodi.
PINOCCHIO has a reputation as the most technically brilliant, emotionally charged, and the most disturbing of any of Disney's full-length animated films. The current reissue allows us to see this paragon in colors that are lusher, sounds that are sharper, in the correct dimensions, and my judgment is that the film fully lives up to the legend. It is every bit as fresh and accessible (and visible, thanks to the technique of printing the original aspect ratio on modern film stock so that the top and bottom of the image area are not cut off), every bit as fresh, I say, as it must have been 52 years ago.
Disney was under pressure in 1940 to repeat the commercial success of SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS. Disney indeed pull out the stops to create a cast of memorable characters, including narrator Jiminy Cricket as Pinocchio's conscience. He commissioned an Oscar-winning score, including the the Best Song "When You Wish Upon a Star" and my personal favorite "I Got No Strings." The animation and the backgrounds are lavish to the point of amazing. My favorite sequence, the Monstro sequence, which begins with Pinocchio's and Jiminy's walk on the floor of the ocean is, I think, especially beautiful as well as impressive, charming, mysterious, amusing, emotional, and frightening. The level of art makes one want to yell "Stop, wait a moment, I want to study this frame" over and over again. Unfortunately for Disney, the film was not a commercial success at first, the reviews were mixed, and audiences were put off by its episodic structure, its general lack of comedy (most of the comedy is decidedly black), and a tonal darkness that frightened adults as well as children. The Paradise Island sequence is often cited as one of the great moments of screen horror. William Everson, as quoted in William Arnold's review in the Seattle P-I, wrote an essay in the 60s in which he called the transformation of Lampwick "surely one of the screen's supreme moments of horror."
The characterizations are detailed and naturalistic. For example, the kitten Figaro, while possessing its cartoon-share of human characteristics, nevertheless is one of the most cat-like cartoon cats I have ever encountered: spunky, sweet, bouncy, tough, playful, curious, cautious. When Figaro walks across Gepetto's comforter, you know that the animators studied living kittens in the perfect way they captured that sure-unsure, fluffy-bottomed walk. I also especially admired the way the characters appear to have mass and weight, to actually be walking on a surface, instead of floating over it as in most animations. This was especially admirable in the ocean-walk, where one could see Pinocchio working against the viscosity and current of the ocean water as well as his buoyancy whenever he stopped moving. These are details that we have pretty much learned to live without even in the best modern animations, such as THE LITTLE MERMAID, where the animators treat the water exactly as they do the air.
The film, for its short 90-minute running time, is packed with more excellences than most films you or I will have occasion to see this year. When you go, there will be many children in the audience. It will be more or less noisy, with TV-bred moppets asking what this or that is, but unless you are terminally hostile to children, you will almost surely find yourself so drawn into the magic of PINOCCHIO that you will become oblivious to the background noise. You will have your favorite character and sequence, but you will so charmed overall that choosing a favorite will become a work of pleasure, of choosing among excellences.
I strongly encourage you to see this release of PINOCCHIO on the big screen, even if you own a video copy or intend to get one.
-- Frank Richard Aloysius Jude Maloney .
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