Painted Puppeteer Carves out a Puppet Painting

From a wooden and strung puppet, as from the depiction of a wooden, strung puppet by flipping painted sketches, comes a delight in craftwork, in refining artifice to life, which gives Walt Disney's Pinocchio, from 1940, its remarkable vibrancy. It has the newness and wonder of a world envisioned through fresh eyes and a fresh medium, as it traces the experiences of a pine marionette, the creation of the woodcarver Geppetto, which is granted a semblance of life and the opportunity to prove itself thoughtful and trustworthy, that it may one day become a real boy.

The film is a brocade of innovations: Jiminy Cricket’s view of a distant cottage bobbing as he hops towards it; Geppetto’s home and workshop, with its polished wood, its animate shadows and quaint mechanical toys; the candescence about the Blue Fairy, like a pool lamp’s under water; the sight of a dancing puppet warped from a fish-tank view. The undersea search for Monstro the whale is particularly enchanting, as it describes a world of blossomy fish, the radiant tentacles of anemone, castanet clams, and pastel corals wriggling from bars of surface light, and all accompanied by Pinocchio’s gurgly dialogue with Jiminy.

Along with its technical ingenuity, what makes the film palatable to viewers less indulgent of cutesy animals and automatons is a surprising range of experience including, along with the magical and the affectionate, the fearful, macabre and cynical. Besides its hopeful nature, it has a mischievous if insightful wit (the prospect of introducing moral sense into a block-head, not to mention the most perfect expression of the liar’s fear of sticking out, with Pinocchio’s growing nose), and its homey and cloying pets are nicely countered by characters like the roguish fox, Honest John, and his dizzy tom-cat companion. The film also taps deeply into childhood anxieties over identity, abandonment, belonging, honesty, and acceptance of one’s decisions and actions, as Pinocchio learns by tripping over ever pothole he comes to (“Oh that’s not temptation- that’s Mr. Honest John!” he assures his guardian cricket).

Like many fairy tales, the film slips sinister themes in with all the fantasy - strange shades around the playroom. There are numerous unsettling moments: Pinocchio, in Stromboli’s circus wagon, trapped in a cage, surrounded by grotesque shadows of swinging marionettes, like gallows dolls; the alarming transformation scene on Pleasure Island, as Lampwick’s shrieking for his mother freaks into a donkey’s brays - hoofs madly kick, lights flash, mirror glass shatters; and the climactic chaos of Monstro, a black, smooth-domed, mountainous whale, creating a frothy tumult from which Pinocchio and Geppetto try desperately to escape.

(Actually, when I was a child, the most disturbing aspect of the story concerned Pinocchio becoming fully human, where a wonderfully suggestive representation of a child is replaced by a more conventional one. I identified more with the flawed Pinocchio, so that the “real” boy seemed, ironically, less real to me.)

The production, as mentioned, shows expertise and care in all departments. The orchestral score is descriptive, springy, tender and romantic, and the songs, including the standards, “When You Wish Upon a Star”, “An Actor’s Life for Me” and “I Got No Strings”, are memorable, of course, and ideally incorporated into the drama.

The final result is a cinematic experience on the experience of life and growth, what it means to be human, and what it means to lose one’s gift of humanity. It overwhelms and reverberates in ways surprising, colorful, amusing, scary and touching, and for its sincerity and commitment, its attempts to tailor the animator’s craft to new and meaningful objects for expression, it is perhaps the most inspired of all Disney cartoon features.