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Pinocchio (1940 film)

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Pinocchio
Directed byBen Sharpsteen
Hamilton Luske
Norman Ferguson
T. Hee
Wilfred Jackson
Jack Kinney
Bill Roberts
Written byAurelius Battaglia
William Cottrell
Otto Englander
Erdman Penner
Joseph Sabo
Ted Sears
Webb Smith
Based on the book by Carlo Collodi
Produced byWalt Disney
StarringCliff Edwards
Dickie Jones
Christian Rub
Mel Blanc
Walter Catlett
Charles Judels
Evelyn Venable
Frankie Darro
Distributed byRKO Radio Pictures
Release dates
February 7, 1940
Running time
88 minutes
Country United States
LanguageEnglish
Budget$2,600,000 USD (est.)

Pinocchio is the second animated feature in the Disney animated features canon. It was produced by Walt Disney and was originally released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on February 7, 1940. Based on the book Pinocchio: Tale of a Puppet by Carlo Collodi, it was made in response to the enormous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The plot of the film involves a wooden puppet being brought to life by a blue fairy, who tells him he can become a real boy if he proves himself worthy by learning courage, kindness, and honesty. Thus begins the puppet's adventures to become a real boy, which involves many an encounter with a host of unsavory characters.

The film was adapted by Aurelius Battaglia, William Cottrell, Otto Englander, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Ted Sears, and Webb Smith 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.

Characters

History

Production

The plan for the original film was considerably different from what was released. Numerous characters and plot points, many of which came from the original novel, were used in early drafts. Producer Walt Disney was displeased with the work that was being done and called a halt to the project midway into production so that the concept could be rethought and the characters redesigned.

Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a Charlie McCarthy-esque wise guy, equally rambunctious and sarcastic, just as in the original novel. He looked exactly like a real wooden puppet with, among other things, a long pointed nose, a peaked cap, and bare wooden hands. But Walt found that no one could really sympathize with such a character and so the designers had to redesign the puppet as much as possible. Eventually, they revised the puppet to make him look more like a real boy, with, among other things, a button nose, a child's Tyrolean hat, and regular, four-fingered hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. The only parts of him that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms and legs.

Additionally, it was at this stage that the character of the cricket was expanded. Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards) became central to the story. Originally, he was depicted as an actual (that is, less anthropomorphized) cricket with toothed legs and waving anntenae. But again Walt wanted someone more likable, so Ward Kimball conjured up "a little man with no ears. That was the only thing about him that was like an insect."

Mel Blanc (most famous for voicing many of the characters in Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons), was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat, who was Foulfellow the Fox's sidekick. However, it was eventually decided for Gideon to be mute (just like Dopey, whose whimsical, Harpo Marx-style persona made him one of Snow White's most comic and popular characters). All of Blanc's recorded dialogue in this film was subsequently deleted, save for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the film.

The influential abstract animator Oskar Fischinger contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand.[1]

Film critic Leonard Maltin would later write that "with Pinocchio, Disney reached not only the height of his powers, but the apex of what many of his (later) critics considered to be the realm of the animated cartoon."[2]

Release: reactions & criticisms

Pinocchio was not commercially successful when first released, and Disney only recouped about half of its $2.3 million budget, which was due in part to poor timing, with the cut-off of European markets due to World War II. By the time the film was released, the mood of Americans had also darkened, also due to the war. People just weren't as keen on seeing fairy tales as they were in the days of Snow White.

But there were other reasons why Pinocchio didn't quite pan out on initial release. One thing that Snow White had that Pinocchio didn't was romance. There wasn't much in the way of "falling-in-love-at-first-sight" in Pinocchio, as there had been in Snow White, which apparently was what people had come to expect of in Disney. To add insult to injury, Paolo Lorenzini, nephew of the original story's author, had beseeched the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture to charge Walt for slander in portraying Pinocchio "so he easily could be mistaken for an American," when it was perfectly obvious that the little puppet was in fact Italian. Nothing had apparently come of the protest.

Nevertheless, there were positive reactions to the movie as well. Archer Winsten, who had criticized Snow White, wrote: "The faults that were in Snow White no longer exist. In writing of Pinocchio, you are limited only by your own power of expressing enthusiasm." Also, despite the poor timing of the release, the film did do well both critically and at the box office in the United States. Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as a fanfare for The Walt Disney Company itself. Pinocchio also won the Academy Award for Best Song and the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and in 1994 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years. Overall, Pinocchio is considered a true-blue classic today,[citation needed] and many film historians consider this to be the film that most closely approaches technical perfection of all the Disney animated features. Link

Re-releases: theatrical & home video

With the re-release of Snow White in 1944 came the tradition of re-releasing Disney films every seven to ten years. Pinocchio has been theatrically re-released in 1945, 1954, 1962, 1971, 1978, 1984, and 1992. The 1992 re-issue was digitally restored by cleaning and removing scratches from the original negatives one frame at a time, eliminating age-old soundtrack distortions, and revitalizing the color. The film also received four video releases, being a hot-seller in 1985, a re-master in 1986, 1993, (all three of those releases were released as Walt Disney Classics videos) and 1999 as a 60th Anniversary edition. It also had a Disney DVD "Limited Issue" release that year before it was added to the Gold Classic Collection in 2000. It was also released on a special edition DVD overseas in 2003. As of late, it is scheduled to be released to the Platinum Edition DVD line in 2008 and if this is true, this will be one of the few Disney classics that has not seen an updated DVD release in eight years.

Pinocchio theatrical release history

Worldwide release dates

Pinocchio home video release history

Crew

Animation direction

Songs

File:Pinocchio hug.jpg
Pinocchio and his father Geppetto are reunited, in a scene from Walt Disney's Pinocchio.

Songs in film

The songs in Pinocchio were composed by Leigh Harline, Ned Washington and Frank Churchill. Paul J. Smith composed the incidental music score.

Songs written for film but not used

  • "I'm a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow" - Jiminy Cricket (this song eventually showed up in Fun and Fancy Free)
  • "As I Was Saying To the Duchess" - J. Worthington Foulfellow (this line is spoken briefly by Foulfellow in the film, however)
  • "Three Cheers For Anything" - Lampwick; Pinocchio; Alexander; Other Boys
  • "Monstro the Whale" - Chorus

Notes

  1. ^ Moritz, William. Fischinger at Disney - or Oskar in the Mousetrap. Millimeter. 5. 2 (1977): 25-28, 65-67. [1]
  2. ^ Maltin, Leonard (1973). Pinocchio. In Leonard Maltin (Ed.), The Disney Book, pp. 37. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

Trivia

  • Lampwick is caricatured after Disney animator Fred Moore.
  • The pool hall at Pleasure Island is in the shape of a giant eight ball with a tall cue-shaped structure standing nearby. This is a takeoff on the Trylon and the Perisphere at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
  • "When You Wish Upon a Star" was ranked #7 in the American Film Institute's 100 Top Movie Songs of All Time, the highest ranking on the list among Disney animated films.
  • Among the debris inside the Model Home (which is open for destruction), a print of Leonardo Da Vinci's "The Mona Lisa" can be seen.
  • One film reviewer compared Pinocchio's first movements and words to the history of cinematic animation itself: the invention of animation ("I can move!"), the advent of sound film ("I can talk!"), and the limitations of animations of cinema itself, the reminder that it's all an illusion ("I can walk!", followed by a stumble).
  • The Blue Fairy was animated using the rotoscope technique.
  • Pinocchio, Geppetto, and Jiminy Cricket, as well as most of the other Pinocchio characters, appear as regular guest stars on Disney's House of Mouse. In fact, an entire episode of the show was devoted to Jiminy, in which the little cricket becomes Mickey's conscience.
  • Monstro the Whale is a playable world in the video games Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories. Pinocchio is also a story-related character in that Riku tries to make off with his heart and use it for Kairi. Also, Queen Minnie assigns Jiminy Cricket to be the journal writer for Sora's adventures in all three games.
  • There was a video game adaptation of this film for both Sega Genesis and Super NES.
  • In Mad Magazine's parody of the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film, Lampwick makes a two-panel cameo as one of the kids in Shredder's gang. In the former of the two panels, Pinocchio himself also appears, being used as a billiards stick.
  • A dark ride attraction based on the story of Pinocchio can be found at Disneyland, Tokyo Disneyland (Pinocchio's Daring Journey) and Disneyland Paris (Les Voyages De Pinocchio).
  • The film was parodied in several Simpsons episodes. In Itchy & Scratchy Land the segment Itchyocchio parodies Pinocchio and Geppetto. In the episode Krusty Gets Cancelled the ventriloquist's dummy Gabbo is introduced to his audience with a great show featuring several other puppets, similar to the scene when Pinocchio performs "I've Got No Strings". Later in the episode a newspaper headline mentions that Gabbo will have "a real boy" operation.
  • In the Disney movie Aladdin Genie transforms himself in Pinocchio to illustrate his disbelief over Aladdin's promise that he will grant Genie his wish to be free.
  • Pinocchio, Geppetto and Stomboli had appeared in the films of Shrek, but Geppetto appeared only in Shrek and Stromboli only in Shrek The Third.

See also


Preceded by Walt Disney Pictures
1940 		Succeeded by
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