Disney Movie Reviews #2: Pinocchio

In one of his recent blog posts, my favorite living film critic, Matt Zoller Seitz, wrote about the special joy of seeing children watch a movie for the first time.  It's the nearest you can get, he says, to experiencing the excitement of that first viewing again.  Even beyond that wonder of first discovery, children possess a tolerance for repetition that allows them to appreciate the same thing over and over again -- I know my little sister couldn't get enough Mary Poppins growing up, while it wore thinner and thinner on me every year.  And the simpler a story gets, the more palatable it will be for the straightforward thinking of the young.  I believe Pinocchio's stellar reputation rests primarily on these powerful points of appeal to children, in a way that Snow White's does not.

Note the books waiting in the background....

Like Snow White, Pinocchio opens with a book.  This book, however, is not real, but drawn.  I won't presume to know what, if any, message Disney intended to send by this change, but it fits easily into an overall trend of the animation.  Where Snow White's human characters (Snow White, the Queen, the Prince, the Hunter) were animated to appear as realistic as possible, the humans of Pinocchio are all cartoons, much like the dwarfs of Snow White.  With the exception of the Blue Fairy, they are all examples of Disney's powerful character design and lively animation prowess, instead of raw technical skill.  Nothing, really, is lost in this shift, and much is gained; the human characters became as much objects of art as of craft.

Geppetto, in particular, looks amazing, though he has a lot more to do than the other humans.  His design and animation reach that particular level of art which outshines reality -- he speaks directly to the part of our brains that understand what a person is and looks like, without needing to go through any bothersome processing.  From an animation perspective, the old toymaker is far and away the most visually interesting thing in this movie, because he's perfect: a cartoon who isn't at all cartoony.

Technically speaking, Pinocchio surpasses Snow White in every way.  The water animation is revolutionary, the lighting and shadows remain incredible (but less obtrusively showcased), and Disney even experiments with mixing stop-motion models in with the animation in certain scenes.

But the most impressive thing I noticed was the use of real cinematography.  The camera moves around a lot, but also zooms in and out on scenes whenever appropriate.  Beyond that, the camera will switch its focus from the foreground to background, and the foreground will blur as the camera moves past.

In the shot above, you can see how the birds become blurry as the camera moves past them.  However, this isn't the end of the movement; the camera continues to zoom past the tower in the middle-left, which blurs out in turn, and then pans right, past a group of children playing in the street, to zoom in again on another group of townspeople, then finally pans right to land on Pinocchio's home.  It's an amazing shot, and one that's only possible in animation.

While this movie makes some tremendous strides forward in animation technique and character design, the non-human characters are a little...rough.  Let's start with Jiminy Cricket.

I want to get something straight.  Jiminy Cricket is a shiftless hobo, a lecher, and a quitter.  Here's a list of what he actually does in this movie:

1. Sings "When You Wish Upon a Star"
2. Hits on the wooden women in Geppetto's fancy clocks
3. Accidentally becomes Pinocchio's conscience when he's too hot-and-bothered to refuse the Blue Fairy's offer
4. Sings "Give a Little Whistle" and spends more time hitting on wooden women
5. Oversleeps, allowing Pinocchio to run into Honest John.  Catches up and half-heartedly tells Pinocchio to go to school instead of going with Honest John, then gives up
6. Witnesses Pinocchio's success in Stromboli's Circus and decides he doesn't need a conscience after all
7. On hearing Pinocchio's cries of distress, tries, and fails, to save Pinocchio from Stromboli.  Luckily, the Blue Fairy intervenes
8. "Races Pinocchio home" and doesn't notice when he gets recaptured by Honest John
9. Shows Pinocchio how to get out of Pleasure Island before he becomes a donkey (this one is actually useful)
10. Swims around underwater, acting like he needs air when he's inside a bubble but not worrying about it the rest of the time
11. Gets stuck outside of Monstro while the other characters are trapped inside
12. Gets awarded an 18K gold badge for being such a great conscience

It's kind of darkly hilarious that such an irresponsible person is one of the most beloved Disney characters.  Then again, it's a fair step up from the original book version, where Pinocchio murders the cricket, who returns to advise him as a ghost.

Aside from his character's personality, he just looks ridiculous. The character designers themselves described him as "little man with an egg head and no ears," and admitted that the only thing that made him a cricket was his name. 

Jiminy Cricket is a shining example of a character who's much more lovable in retrospect.  The other inhuman characters occupy much the same place in the cultural memory; their historical importance and easy identification has so outgrown their actual roles in the movie that watching them with any context is a disappointment.

Honest John the fox and Gideon the cat.  Gideon is voiced by Mel Blanc, famed voice actor of Bugs Bunny, among others.  For Giden, only one line made the final cut:  a hiccup.

Honest John and Gideon occupy a very peculiar place in this story.  We see no other human-sized anthropomorphic animals; every other character of that scale is a human, but humans do business with these two without any concerns.  How have such rascals gained that level of acceptance in society?  I suppose it's a testament to the tolerance and equality of animated 1880s Italian society.  Also, big props to Honest John's practiced bit of eavesdropper-bait:  "As I was saying to the Duchess..."

Strangeness aside, they're not very interesting characters.  They're bad guys, and they want money, but they try to present themselves in such a way as not to seem so bad, and it almost feels like they believe it.  As a result, they're just sort of goofy, more irritating than unlikable, and hardly villainous.

I do want to point out that Gideon is responsible for my favorite visual in the movie, when he blows a smoke ring, dips it into his beer, and takes a big bite like a donut.  Featuring Mel Blanc's hiccup!

The rest of the villains are in much the same boat.  They don't have anything against Pinocchio; they just want to make money.  And there are four of them, including Honest John and Gideon, Stromboli, and the Coachman, the guy who runs Pleasure Island.  I won't consider Monstro a villain; he's just a whale doing his whale thing.  But for the rest of them, there's precious little time devoted to characterizing or building them up as villains.  In contrast to the awesome hatefulness of the Evil Queen in Snow White, these guys are in and out of their scenes before we even get to know them.  I mean, they're jerks, but so was Grumpy.  

Okay, the Coachman is a little worse than a jerk.

Honest John is actually worried about sending boys to Pleasure Island, because of "the law".  The Coachman tells him not to be concerned, because they never come back "as boys."  Which raises the question:  what law is Honest John worried about?  The only downside to Pleasure Island is that it turns boys into donkeys!  And if that's happening, then he'd have no reason to fear them telling the tale!

Maybe Honest John is just afraid of the shadow monsters that work the place.

I find the entire scheme of Pleasure Island a little hard to credit.  We're supposed to believe that the costs of building and operating an entire island, complete with unlimited beer, food, and fancy mansions to destroy, are outweighed by the revenue generated from selling a few dozen donkeys every day?  It just doesn't add up.  So the Coachman, evil as he is, remains a businessman at heart, albeit a poor one; he has nothing against Pinocchio, so it's hard for the audience to root against him (especially since his victims have earned their fates!)  Usually, we define our opposition to the villain by our support for the protagonist.  Here, I think we have the crux of the problem I had with this movie.

Do you like Pinocchio?  I don't think it would ever occur to a child to ask herself that question.  Of course kids like Pinocchio; he's the main character.  More than that, he's a kid, asked to deal with the crazy rules of a confusing world that he doesn't fully understand.  For a kid, he's totally relatable.  For an adult...maybe not.  All he has to do is listen to Jiminy Cricket.  Admittedly, Jiminy is a terrible conscience, but he's better than no conscience.  And Pinocchio ignores him over and over.

Pinocchio is dumber than any real kid.  He's infinitely credulous, and is so "young" that his character is completely underdeveloped.  He has no real opinion or wishes of his own, other than wanting to make Geppetto happy (when he remembers) and wanting to be a real boy.  As far as I can tell, he only even wants to be a real boy because the Blue Fairy told him he should.

For being such a famous aspect of his character it's surprising that this only happens once.  The ramifications of his nose's spontaneous generation of birds are pretty alarming.

The final scenes somewhat redeem Pinocchio's character, as his quest to rescue Geppetto from Monstro shows true initiative, and features the most visually inventive scene of the whole movie:

Pinocchio starts being interesting when he finally starts acting like a character, and takes action instead of constantly reacting to everyone around him.  Unfortunately, that's at the very end of the movie, but it happens just in time.

As for the songs, there are really only three worth mentioning.  When You Wish Upon a Star is fundamental, but serves only as an introduction song.  Give a Little Whistle is catchy, but comic given foreknowledge of Jiminy's suitability to his job.  Lastly, I've Got No Strings is fun, but mostly unintelligible given the ridiculous accents of most of the singers, and even it's nothing more than a series of puns on marionettes.  Little Wooden Head and Hi Diddle Dee Dee are simply forgettable.

From an adult perspective, Pinocchio is a painfully raw morality tale.  It's just too simple, and the plot and characters too attuned to the minds of children, for mature viewers to garner much enjoyment from watching it.  This is a big change from Snow White, which is at times irreverent, coarse, and joyous enough to be fun for viewers of any mental age.  But Pinocchio is also quite a bit darker than Snow White, which is very strange for a movie that's comparatively much more childish.

In theory, Pinocchio committed the greatest crime of any film:  it bored me.  Even so, I recognize that there is incredible value in it for children, who are not so jaded and miserable and can appreciate better the struggles of someone still trying to pin down his identity.  Unlike Snow White, Pinocchio isn't really interested in entertaining adults, and that's not truly a fault; nevertheless, it is the absence of a virtue.  The greatest animated stories find a way to entertain everyone.  Snow White may not have had much of a story, but the single conflict it did have was exciting and meaningful enough to hold universal appeal.  Pinocchio's series of disconnected struggles are interesting enough in their own ways, but they fail to coalesce into a whole with any semblance of a theme.

Technically revolutionary, artistically visionary, and thematically immature:  I'm afraid these are going to be consistent reactions of mine as I progress through the Disney catalog.  With Fantasia up next, I'm concerned that this may, in fact, be the way the trends are going.  When Disney moved on from Snow White, they left something behind.  I'm wishing on a star that they'll find it again, and soon.

PINOCCHIO

1940

RATING:  A-

REASONING:  It surpasses Snow White only in the visuals.  An amazing film for children or anyone who though the Evil Queen was overdeveloped.