The Animation Freak. Pinocchio.
Jiminy Cricket addresses the audience as narrator to tell a story of a wish coming true. The story takes place in a village in Italy, where he arrived at the shop of a woodworker and toymaker named Geppetto, who lives with his pets, Figaro the kitten and Cleo the goldfish. Geppetto creates a marionette who he names Pinocchio. Falling asleep, Geppetto wishes on a star for Pinocchio to be a real boy. Late that night, a Blue Fairy visits the workshop and brings Pinocchio to life, although he remains a puppet. She informs him that if he proves himself brave, truthful, and unselfish, he will become a real boy. When Jiminy reveals himself, the Blue Fairy assigns him to be Pinocchio's conscience. Geppetto wakes up, and is overjoyed to discover his puppet is alive and will become a real boy.
The next morning, on his way to school, Pinocchio is led astray by con-artist fox Honest John and his sidekick Gideon the Cat. Honest John convinces him to join Stromboli's puppet show, despite Jiminy's objections. Pinocchio becomes Stromboli's star attraction but when he tries to go home, Stromboli locks him in a cage and leaves to tour the world with Pinocchio. After Jiminy unsuccessfully tries to free his friend, the Blue Fairy appears and an anxious Pinocchio lies on what happened, but his nose grows longer and longer. The Blue Fairy restores his nose and frees him when Pinocchio promises to make amends, but warns him she can no longer help him.
Honest John and Gideon are promised money by a mysterious "Coachman", if they can find disobedient boys for him to take to Pleasure Island. Though Honest John and Gideon are frightened by the Coachman's implication on what happens to the boys, the former convinces Pinocchio to take a vacation on Pleasure Island after his terrible experience with Stromboli. On the way, Pinocchio befriends Lampwick, a delinquent boy. At Pleasure Island, without rules or authority to enforce their activity, Pinocchio, Lampwick and other boys soon engage in smoking cigars and cigarettes, gambling, vandalism, and getting drunk, much to Jiminy's frustration. Jiminy discovers that the Coachman turns the boys into donkeys for their misdeeds and sells them to slave labor in salt mines and circuses. Pinocchio witnesses Lampwick transforming into a donkey, and with Jiminy's help, Pinocchio escapes, partially transformed with donkey ears and a tail, though they have to abandon Lampwick and the boys in the clutches of the Coachman.
Returning home, Pinocchio and Jiminy find Geppetto’s workshop deserted. They get a letter from the Blue Fairy in the form of a dove, stating that Geppetto had gone out looking for Pinocchio but was swallowed by Monstro, a huge, vicious ship-eating whale, and is now living in the belly of the beast. Determined to rescue his father, Pinocchio jumps into the sea, accompanied by Jiminy. Pinocchio is soon swallowed by Monstro, where he reunites with Geppetto. Pinocchio devises a scheme to make Monstro sneeze, giving them a chance to escape. The scheme works, but the enraged whale chases them and smashes their raft. Pinocchio selflessly pulls Geppetto to safety in a cave just as Monstro crashes into it and Pinocchio is seemingly killed.
Back home, Geppetto, Jiminy, and the pets are heartbroken over the still form of Pinocchio. However, the Blue Fairy revives Pinocchio and turns him into a real human boy, getting rid of his donkey ears and tail in the process, much to everyones joy. As the group celebrate, Jiminy steps outside to thank the Fairy and is rewarded with a solid gold badge that certifies him as an official conscience.
In September 1937, during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, animator Norman Ferguson brought a translated version of Carlo Collodi's 1883 Italian children's novel The Adventures of Pinocchio to the attention of Walt Disney. After reading the book, "Walt was busting his guts with enthusiasm" as Ferguson later recalled. Disney then commissioned storyboard artist Bianca Majolie to write a new story outline for the book, but after reading it, he felt her outline was too faithful. Pinocchio was intended to be the studio's third feature, after Bambi. However, due to difficulties with Bambi (adapting the story and animating the animals realistically), Disney announced that Bambi would be postponed while Pinocchio would move ahead in production. Ben Sharpsteen was then re-assigned to supervise the production while Jack Kinney was given directional reins.
Unlike Snow White, which was a short story that the writers could expand and experiment with, Pinocchio was based on a novel with a very fixed, although episodic, story. Therefore, the story went through drastic changes before reaching its final incarnation. In the original novel, Pinocchio is a cold, rude, ungrateful, inhuman brat that often repels sympathy and only learns his lessons the hard way. The writers decided to modernize the character and depict him similar to Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy, but equally as rambunctious as the puppet in the book. The story was still being developed in the early stages of animation.
Early scenes animated by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston show that Pinocchio's design was exactly like that of a real wooden puppet with a long pointed nose, a peaked cap and bare wooden hands. Disney, however, was not impressed with the work that was being done on the film. He felt that no one could really sympathize with such a character and called for an immediate halt in production. Fred Moore redesigned the character slightly to make him more appealing, but the design still retained a wooden feel. Young and upcoming animator Milt Kahl felt that Thomas, Johnston and Moore were "rather obsessed with the idea of this boy being a wooden puppet" and felt that they should "forget that he was a puppet and get a cute little boy; you can always draw the wooden joints and make him a wooden puppet afterwards". Co-supervising director Hamilton Luske suggested to Kahl that he should demonstrate his beliefs by animating a test sequence. Kahl showed Disney a test scene in which Pinocchio is underwater looking for his father. From this scene, Kahl re-envisioned the character by making him look more like a real boy, with a child's Tyrolean hat and standard cartoon character four-fingered (or three and a thumb) hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. The only parts of Pinocchio that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms, legs and his little button wooden nose. Disney embraced Kahl's scene and immediately urged the writers to evolve Pinocchio into a more innocent, naïve, somewhat coy personality that reflected Kahl's design.
However, Disney discovered that the new Pinocchio was too helpless and was far too often led astray by deceiving characters. Therefore, in the summer of 1938, Disney and his story team established the character of the cricket. Originally, the talking cricket was only a minor character that Pinocchio abruptly killed by squashing him with a mallet and that later returned as a ghost. Disney dubbed the cricket "Jiminy", and made him into a character that would try to guide Pinocchio into the right decisions. Once the character was expanded, he was depicted as a realistic cricket with toothed legs and waving antennae, but Disney wanted something more likable. Ward Kimball had spent several months animating two sequences—a soup-eating musical number and a bed-building sequence—in Snow White, which was cut from the film due to pacing reasons. Kimball was about to quit until Disney rewarded him for his work by promoting him to the supervising animator of Jiminy Cricket. Kimball then conjured up the design for Jiminy Cricket, whom he described as a little man with an egg head and no ears. Jiminy "was a cricket because we called him a cricket," Kimball later joked.
Animation on the film began in January 1938, but work on Pinocchio's animation was discontinued as the writers sought to re-work his characterization and the film's narrative structure. However, animation on the film's supporting characters started in April 1938. Animation would not resume again with the revised story until September.
During the production of the film, story artist Joe Grant formed a character model department, which would be responsible for building three-dimensional clay models of the characters in the film, known as maquettes. These models were then given to the staff to observe how a character should be drawn from any given angle desired by the artists. The model makers also built working models of Geppetto's elaborate cuckoo clocks designed by Albert Hurter, as well as Stromboli's gypsy wagon and wooden cage, and the Coachman's carriage. However, owing to the difficulty animating a realistic moving vehicle, the artists filmed the carriage maquettes on a miniature set using stop motion animation. Then, each frame of the animation was transferred onto animation cels using an early version of a Xerox. The cels were then painted on the back and overlaid on top of background images with the cels of the characters to create the completed shot on the rostrum camera. Like Snow White, live-action footage was shot for Pinocchio with the actors playing the scenes in pantomime, supervised by Luske. Rather than tracing, which would result in stiff unnatural movement, the animators used the footage as a guide for animation by studying human movement and then incorporating some poses into the animation (though slightly exaggerated).
Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation, led by Joshua Meador. In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create everything that moves other than the characters. This includes vehicles, machinery and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water, as well as the fantasy or science-fiction type effects like the Pixie Dust of Peter Pan (1953 film). The influential abstract animator Oskar Fischinger, who mainly worked on Fantasia contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand. Effects animator Sandy Strother kept a diary about his year-long animation of the water effects, which included splashes, ripples, bubbles, waves and the illusion of being underwater. To help give depth to the ocean, the animators put more detail into the waves on the water surface in the foreground, and put in less detail as the surface moved further back. After the animation was traced onto cels, the assistant animators would trace it once more with blue and black pencil leads to give the waves a sculptured look. To save time and money, the splashes were kept impressionistic. These techniques enabled Pinocchio to be one of the first animated films to have highly realistic effects animation. Ollie Johnston remarked "I think that's one of the finest things the studio's ever done, as Frank Thomas said, 'The water looks so real a person can drown in it, and they do.'
M. Keith Booker considers the film to be the most down-to-earth of the Disney animated films despite its theme song and magic, and notes that the film's protagonist has to work to prove his worth, which he remarked seemed "more in line with the ethos of capitalism" than most of the Disney films. Claudia Mitchell and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh believe that the male protagonists of films like Pinocchio and Bambi (1942) were purposefully constructed by Disney to appeal to both boys and girls. Mark I. Pinsky said that it is "a simple morality tale—cautionary and schematic—ideal for moral instruction, save for some of its darker moments", and noted that the film is a favorite of parents of young children.
Nicolas Sammond argues that the film is "an apt metaphor for the metaphysics of midcentury American child-rearing" and that the film is "ultimately an assimilationist fable". He considered it to be the central Disney film and the most strongly middle class, intended to relay the message that indulging in "the pleasures of the working class, of vaudeville, or of pool halls and amusement parks, led to a life as a beast of burden". For Sammond, the purpose of Pinocchio is to help convey to children the "middle-class virtues of deferred gratification, self-denial, thrift, and perseverance, naturalized as the experience of the most average American".
Author and illustrator Maurice Sendak, who saw the film in theaters in 1940, called the film superior to Collodi's novel in its depiction of children and growing up. "The Pinocchio in the film is not the unruly, sulking, vicious, devious (albeit still charming) marionette that Collodi created. Neither is he an innately evil, doomed-to-calamity child of sin. He is, rather, both lovable and loved. Therein lies Disney's triumph. His Pinocchio is a mischievous, innocent and very naive little wooden boy. What makes our anxiety over his fate endurable is a reassuring sense that Pinocchio is loved for himself -- and not for what he should or shouldn't be. Disney has corrected a terrible wrong. Pinocchio, he says, is good; his "badness" is only a matter of inexperience," and also that "Pinocchio's wish to be a real boy remains the film's underlying theme, but "becoming a real boy" now signifies the wish to grow up, not the wish to be good."
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