If the film is unsettling, consider the novel it was based on, Carlo Collodi’s “ Adventures of Pinocchio” (1883). As Allan points out, seventy-six of “Pinocchio” ’s eighty-eight minutes-that’s eighty-six per cent-take place at night or under water. Danger and death surround this small creature throughout the film. Then you inspect the drawing more closely and realize that the reason his face is blank is that he is numb with fear, like someone in a horror movie. Pinocchio alone seems to be alive, but he stares straight ahead, expressionless. Other marionettes hang from the ceiling on strings, as if they had been lynched. Robin Allan, in his beautiful book “ Walt Disney and Europe” (1999), reproduces what he calls an “atmosphere sketch” for “Pinocchio,” by the Disney artist Gustaf Tenggren, showing the puppet locked in a cage, just after he has been kidnapped by an itinerant puppeteer.
Perhaps the answer lies not in any one scene but in the movie’s over-all bleakness. Benjamin Spock once wrote that all the seats in the vast auditorium of Radio City Music Hall had to be reupholstered because so many children wet their pants while watching the film.) Well, what about “Dumbo” (1941), where the baby elephant has to watch as his mother is whipped and chained, howling for her child? O.K., what about “ Bambi” (1942), where the fawn’s mother is shot to death a few feet away from him? You can’t beat that, can you?īut, for some reason, “Pinocchio” does.
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Go to anyone you know who was in grammar school in the nineteen-forties and fifties and ask, What was the Disney movie that scared you the most? Was it “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), where the evil queen falls off a cliff to her death? (Dr. Many people say it is their least favorite. Of the half-dozen or so films that turned Walt Disney, in the public’s mind, from the father of Mickey Mouse to the creator of the animated fairy-tale feature-thereby making his work a fixture in the imaginative life of almost every American child-“Pinocchio” (1940) feels like the odd one out.
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