PINOCCHIO. Animation with the Potential of a Chiller

Let us set aside what floats on the surface of Disney’s Pinocchio. The parable of a miracle, for instance, in which a wooden toy first comes to life and then turns into a real boy. I would also push the good-natured fairy to the margins. She appears only in moments of last resort—when salvation has already vanished far beyond the horizon. Pinocchio teaches that one must keep believing and never give up—even when death stares us in the face—because then a star from the sky will come to our aid and guarantee an optimistic ending. It is an apparently cheerful vision, but one paid for in advance with a depressive sense of loss, sorrow, and fear. Pinocchio accumulates precisely these unwanted images and emotions. It is a children’s animation with the potential of a chiller.

Take Geppetto, for example. A carpenter and a loner, living in a gloomy workshop. His cat and fish may be his closest companions, yet they seem more to fill an aching sense of emptiness than to constitute the true substance of his life. Let us look around his home as well. It is filled with wooden masks bearing threatening stares and with cuckoo clocks threaded with a recurring motif of death. Whether it is a hunter shooting at a bird poking its head from a hollow on the hour, or a rustic genre scene in which a turkey loses its head to an axe.

Over the course of the film, poor Geppetto truly dies twice. First on a symbolic plane, when he is swallowed by a whale and sees no chance of escape. Later, when he weeps over the body of his “son.” At that moment he seems to lose all vital force, and his life is stripped of meaning. Only a third intervention by the fairy can restore it. Thus the tragic fates of Pinocchio and Geppetto are saved by supernatural providence. I doubt anyone could place such unwavering trust in grace—after all, a phenomenon so random. Fortunately, our heroes—confined as they are within the framework of a fantastic fairy tale—are capable of believing in miracles all the more strongly.

Pinocchio, too, must suffer a great deal. The boy, however, is unaware of the scale of the evil of which he is a victim. In this case, the viewer’s imagination and knowledge can lend his adventures a new, terrifying context. For if one were to know the dreams of any loving parent, the fate of Pinocchio—an utterly defenseless small child—would surely be counted among the nightmares that jolt one awake in the middle of the night.

The first day of school. Pinocchio is kidnapped by two thugs whose caricatural guises—a cat and a fox—directly invoke the fairy-tale convention, softening the essence of this traumatic event. He is first sold to a traveling circus, where he is imprisoned and exploited. Thanks to an escape, the boy experiences only fleeting happiness. Soon, however, he falls into the clutches of a sleazy enthusiast of minors. The man pays handsomely for him and takes the boy—however pathologically this may sound—to “Pleasure Island.”

It is precisely this harrowing sequence of events that links Pinocchio to the repertoire of crime films and thrillers. Disney’s 1940 animation, like most productions from the early decades of this legendary studio, operates suggestively through subtext and implication. Beneath the adventurous-fantastical surface, there often lie contents that go far beyond innocent moral fables. One should not lie, by the way, because your nose will grow—but these films are concerned with matters of a much greater caliber (see also Artificial Worlds on Alice in Wonderland, Dumbo, or The Jungle Book). In each of these animations, evil manifests itself in ways that are not so obvious or expected. What is most frightening is hidden deeper down. Whether this was deliberately encoded by the creators or not is beside the point.

One of the animation’s main characters—the Cricket—announces at the film’s opening an “old story of a miracle.” If we do not believe in miracles, we must get to know the adventures of Pinocchio! A magical aura is intertwined here with, to put it mildly, melancholy, and the fairy descending from the starry sky does not allow genuine human tragedy to fully resonate. The plot of Pinocchio is stretched between radically different dramatic and stylistic poles. This intriguing duality is certainly one of the key factors behind the appeal and timelessness of this classic Disney animation.