![]() ![]() The drawing of this scene (by the excellent Enrico Mazzanti) in the novel’s first edition is hard to look at. When Geppetto returns home, he bursts into tears and lifts the puppet to his breast. He then falls asleep, and as a result his feet are burned off. Early on, at home alone, he lies back in a chair, propping his feet against the room’s brazier. Pinocchio, for all his naughtiness, suffers terribly. Geppetto tries to prune it back, “but the more he cut and shortened it, the longer that impudent nose became.” This nose will become Pinocchio’s trademark feature, and the combined comedy and cruelty that attend its birth can be said to stand for Collodi’s novel as a whole: Geppetto got Pinocchio by cutting, and for most of the remainder of the tale Pinocchio cuts him-mocks him, runs away from him. Next comes the nose, which, the moment Geppetto has finished it, starts to grow to an enormous length. The tale begins with a lethal weapon: under blows from an axe, the pine log that will become Pinocchio cries out, “Ouch! you’ve hurt me!” Soon afterward, the woodworker Geppetto starts fashioning the log into a puppet, which he calls Pinocchio: pino, in Italian, meaning pine, and occhio, meaning eye, one of the first parts of Pinocchio that Geppetto liberates from within the log. 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. 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. He waited two minutes, and nothing: five minutes, and nothing ten minutes, and nothing.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from. Then he stopped to listen, so as to hear if there was any voice that complained. him.”Īnd saying this, he seized with both hands that poor piece of wood and knocked it around without pity against the stone wall of the room. What if there may be someone hidden inside? If there is, so much the worse for him. This is an ordinary piece of wood for the fireplace, like all other pieces with which we boil a pot of beans. Can it be that this piece of wood has learned to cry and scream like a baby I cannot believe it? This time Master Cherry became dumb, with his scared eyes nearly popping out of his head, with his mouth opened wide,Īnd with his tongue hanging down on his chin, like a gorgon head on a fountain.Īs soon as he could speak he said, trembling and stammering from fright, “But where does that little voice come from that says “Oh? Oh! you have hurt me!” cried the little voice, as if in pain. He took up the ax and again gave the piece of wood a hard blow. “I understand,” he said, laughing and scratching his wig: I imagined I heard that little voice. ![]() He opened the door in order to glance around his house and no one did. ![]() He looked under the bench, and no one he looked in a sideboard which was always closed, and no one he looked in the basket of chips and shavings, and no one ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |