Pinocchio

Hey, isn't that poster awesome? Don't you wish movie posters were a little more like that now? I'd love to see a Pixar poster with hand-drawn, more cartoony versions of the characters. In fact, has Pixar done this? Am I forgetting something? It seems like something they would do.

As some of you followers of this blog might know, I'm on a quest to revisit, or visit for the first time (I don't even know which ones I've seen) all of the classic Walt Disney animated films. I started with Fantasia and continued with Sleeping Beauty. And now comes Pinocchio, only the second animated feature ever made. Once again, I'm not sure if I had ever seen it all the way through.

When I was a kid, I remember really not liking this movie, or maybe just the story, or the clips I saw. I think it was the stuff about all the bad boys. Even at a young age, I was a pretty righteous little turd, and couldn't really relate to these rebellious little boys. I didn't really see where the appeal was or where the temptation could be found in what was, in the '30's, "boys will be boys" behavior (obviously to an excess). In fact, looking back, I was much more Jiminy Cricket than I was Pinocchio.

Last year sometime, I caught the second half of Pinocchio on TV and realized, hey, this is pretty awesome. Now that I've finally seen it from beginning to end, I can now confirm that notion. It's a pretty dark and weird film, and the animation is more daring and ambitious than their previous precedent set by Snow White. The story moves forward quickly from one imaginative adventure to the next, balancing the darkness with plenty of well-timed comedy.

I'm sure I don't need to go into the story, but in short: Eccentric toymaker Gepetto wishes upon a star that his puppet boy becomes his son, it comes true, but the blue fairy gives Pinocchio the task of earning his humanity. With Jiminy Cricket as his conscience, Pinocchio gets lost in the huge world outside, and must overcome the temptations and corruption found there.

I Honest John the fox, who acts as Pinocchio's first temptation. He sings the "Hey Diddle Dee Dee" song. Anyway, he's a conniving, greedy, rat of a fox, but as far as that stuff goes, he's pretty low on the totem pole, so he's a little more likeable than say, the fat guy who keeps Pinocchio in a cage, or the coachman who sells him to a child-to-donkey slavery ring.

Speaking of which, there's some pretty disturbing imagery in the Pleasure Island sequence. Those kids transforming into donkeys is pretty intense. And there's that shot of them all huddled together and crying for their moms while the slavedriver looms over them with a whip.

Hey, you know what else surprised me? The nose growing scene. It only happens once! Don't get me wrong, the scene is brilliant. I guess I just thought it was sort of a motif of Pinocchio. It's the part we all know best. If this movie were made now, it would have happened 12 times, including a climactic scene where he uses lying to make his nose grow to save the day.

My favorite sequence in the whole movie is at the end, when Gepetto is eaten by Monstro the whale. Monstro is such a cool design, and probably my favorite animation in the movie is after he sneezes them out and he's chasing them. The look of the torrential rain and the waves splashing off of him is striking. The rain is all done with white lines over the action.

So hey, Pinocchio is another winner. I don't think I was into it as much as Fantasia or Sleeping Beauty, but still very much a masterpiece. The next Disney classic I plan on buying on Blu Ray is Bambi. So little was my childhood interest in Bambi, I don't think I've ever seen it all the way through, and we even had it on VHS. It might be a couple months before I get to it, but I'm looking forward to giving it another shot.

Hey, thanks for reading, everyone! Feel free to leave comments and let me know what you think. I hope you're not getting too bored of this recent string of Japanese movies, kids movies, and Japanese kids movies. It just worked out that way. I'll try to throw in a crappy 80's action movie or something in the near future to mix things up.