Here is the 1945 re-release by RKO for Pinocchio. Walt Disney did it best. And who knew he could be such a fright-monger. First he goes all supernatural evil with Snow White, then gives us a strong taste of unexpected body horror in Pinocchio. When I first saw those boys turning into donkeys, wow! Now that was scary. And he left them that way! Double wow.
The evolution of Pinocchio’s character through illustration is a fascinating read. At first the thought was to depict him as a wooden puppet, but after months going back and forth, Milt Kahl took an approach that Disney preferred: namely, animating Pinocchio as a little boy first, then moving him toward visual reminders of his wooden nature second; this changed Collodi’s “skinny, brash, cocky piece of cherry wood” (Frank Thomas) into a more innocent, passive character learning the ropes of life the hard way. This, of course, made him more endearing to audiences and created a stronger emotional connection between both, a Disney necessity with all its characters.
The movie itself broke new ground in animation and the use of the multiplane camera for depth, shifting the usual vertical position to a horizontal one. Multiple glass layers of artwork would be moved past the camera a varying speeds, creating water movement, flickering lights, and parallax. At 2.6 million dollars, a small army of animators, and two years of production, the movie didn’t do well at the box office (perhaps mainly due to the loss of overseas markets because of Word War II), but remains a classic today, even with the reimagining we’ve had to suffer through in later stabs at the story.
For Disney’s purposes, Collodi’s impudent protagonist was, in contrast to the characters in Snow White, all too distinct. “One difficulty in Pinocchio,” as Disney said on 3 December 1937, in one of his first meetings with the film’s writers, “is that people know the story, but they don’t like the character.” (Michael Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age.)
