looking deep and liking what i see
"[With animation] the law of universal metamorphism rules: Anything can become something else."
-- Robert McKee, Story.
Although the story is quick, episodic and simplistic by contemporary (non-kids-movie) dramatic standards, Walt Disney's 1940 Pinocchio certainly uses its time and scenes wisely. How rich a metaphor is it to have a character interact with the literal personification of his conscience? Such as when said conscience consistently disappears or fails to speak up whenever things are going just a little too well. "Oh well," laments Jiminy Cricket early on, when Pinocchio's stage career seems a sure thing, "What's an actor need with a conscience anyhow?" He may be the wooden boy's honorary conscience, but he's at least as culpable as "ol' Pinoke" himself.
By today's standards though, Pinocchio is impossibly dark. It makes Coraline looks like the Wiggles in terms of stakes and peril. At one point, Honest John (the fox who tempts Pinocchio into trouble twice with his Pied-Piper's song "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actor's Life for Me)," which by the way sounds suspiciously like an upbeat riff on "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life For Me)," or is it vice versa?) casually asks the Coachman who he needs to kill for the bag of gold he's being offered. When Stromboli tells Pinocchio that once he stops making the man money he'll turn the boy into firewood, he chucks a hatchet deep into the chest of an already broken, lifeless marionette, unambiguously showing us that our hero will be killed. Not to mention Pleasure Island, where the donkey-boys are sold to salt mines and circuses. In other words, this is a world where child slavery and murder lurk around every corner. This is not a world for a kid who keeps losing his conscience.
It's amazing how well the scenes stick with you, since each feels in the watching so short, and each resolves merely with Pinocchio's and Jiminy's (or Pinocchio's and his whole family's) escape. Villains and antagonists are never punished; in fact, their operations aren't even halted or hindered. The Coachmen will go right on tempting other boys and girls into jackassery; Honest John will go right on duping anybody he can dupe; Monstro will go right on terrorizing the oceans. It's a different kind of message than a film today would dare suggest, and for that it stands out as a bolder and more interesting world to inhabit than the plastic, morally simplistic world Disney would go on to propagate with their media-industrial complex.
The imagery is beautiful and the characterization solid (Figaro's easily the cutest animated cat of all time). The musical numbers are integrated into the story in a much more seamless and entertaining way than I'm used to. The pop culture references are less references and more homages (Honest John's sidekick Gideon is in every way Harpo Marx, and several outfits and characters in the story's beginning seem indebted to Oliver Twist). It's almost as though they were concerned more with making a good film than making a Disney film. And it shows in every aspect of the production, refreshingly.
But what really sticks with me, as an adult and a writer/critical reader, are the deeper ideas and moral gray space the story is allowed to explore.
Speaking of metamorphism and metaphor, think of this. Pinocchio is told by the Blue Fairy he will never be a real boy until he proves himself to be brave, truthful and unselfish. Pinoke wants to be "real," meaning a person; standing in his way is his own naïvete and ignorance, his own weak character and selfish impulses. How much more explicit could a coming of age story be? This isn't a puppet becoming a boy, it's a boy becoming a man. Along the way, he learns not to trust strangers, not to allow himself to be exploited, and not to give in to the temptations of sin -- gambling (billiards), smoking, drinking, fighting and vandalism all lead to "being a jackass." In the metamorphic universe of animation, we translate that literally as the Pleasure Island realm of sin simply turns children into donkeys -- Pinocchio himself barely escapes the same fate as his friends with the last-minute realization (by his conscience) that surely a price must be paid for all this vice.
But when he discovers that in his absence his father Geppetto (along with Figaro and Cleo, the cat and goldfish respectively) have disappeared into the belly of a whale and need to be saved, it is Pinocchio's tail -- that is to say, it is the rough and unpleasant manifestation of his time spent living a less-than-pious life -- that literally anchors Pinoke to the earth as he sets off on a hopeless-seeming journey across the sea floor in search of a monster so huge and epic (Monstro the whale) that it is more force of nature than villain. Had Pinocchio not been partially a "jackass" he would have been unable to use his tail to tether himself to the rock and he might have lacked the tools needed to find and rescue his father and prove his bravery.
In other words, had Pinocchio avoided temptation and been the perfect boy in the first place, it's reasonable to assume Geppetto wouldn't have been playing Jonah, but Pinocchio also wouldn't have been able to act bravely, to do anything to help if Monstro's belly was just one of those things in life you can't avoid spending a little time inside. Pinocchio needed to sin a little in order to be "a real boy," which is our stand-in for "a person" or (in the non-gender-specific phallocentric western sense) "a man." One could argue that the story endorses and encourages experimentation and unruly behavior in one's college years, just before becoming an adult.
All that is to say, Pinocchio suggest that it takes a little bit of badness to be a whole person. Can you imagine a Disney film today trying to offer such a message?
(P.S. In case it isn't obvious from the above quote, I broke down and bought Robert McKee's perpetually-hardcover-only second-biggest-cliché screenwriting-guide Story today. It looks promising, but it feels weird to go back to classic texts. Not sure why. I guess it's the idea that great writers don't indulge in such things, that it's the move of a floundering amateur. Well, fuck it. I'll consume everything I can to help me think in the right terms to write something, especially if I'm relying on genre like I am.)