The second animated feature released by Disney, Pinocchio went into production along with Bambi, which is a film I much prefer but came out a good two years later. Based on a novel, the title character is a puppet that comes to life, but differs in tone and shape from the original material. To add a connective tissue that could introduce the story as much as have a say in it, Disney created the character of Jiminy Cricket, who crashes Geppetto's house as he is building the puppet. The representation of Geppetto is that of a Ned Flanders-type carpenter who desperately wants to have a kid. Geppetto's puppet is a happy, innocent little boy with rosy cheeks, and when he first comes alive he meets Jiminy. As is the case for Snow White, there's only one pure female character modeled after realistic movement, in this case, the Blue Fairy, who puts life into Pinocchio. She then puts Jiminy in charge of being Pinocchio's "conscience", and leaves only to appear a few times throughout the film and advice him. Wonder why she couldn't be his conscience.
The musical sequences are sort of dry. The house in which they dance and go to bed has nothing more than a bunch of wooden clocks, a cat, and a fish, making for dull opening sequences that are overlong. "When You Wish Upon a Star" has become the de facto Disney song, scoring the company intro. On one hand, it encapsulates the themes of the film and Disney overall accurately, which I think is valuable, but on the other, they invited actor Cliff Edwards to do the voice of Jiminy Cricket so he could sing the main song but they never animated Jiminy singing it, so it cannot be related to any character except for those old school Disney choirs. This very low-oxygenated setup makes the film not so inviting as much as numbing.
A couple of mischievous foxes sell our boy hero to a puppeteer, sending him off on his first adventure. By the middle of the film he ends up caged and needs to be rescued by Jiminy, and gets visited by the Blue Fairy. This is the only moment in which Pinocchio's nose grows. Although it is a famous feature of the character, it is only included in the movie once, to make a single pun that teaches kids not to lie, instead of being of use in the story (another win for Shrek 2, I guess). Once Pinocchio is alone, all he does is smile through trouble by carrying his conscience when no one else will guide him. There is a smart dynamic of him trying to decide what to do, sometimes following his "conscience" and sometimes disagreeing with it, like the moment they both jump off the cliff. Once he gets freed, he falls under a different scheme by the same foxes. Although considered a coming-of-age analogy, Pinocchio doesn't grow unilaterally. The lessons he learns are unconnected, and Jiminy has trouble teaching them well to him. His path to goodness in the second act has nothing to do with what heroic decisions he takes eventually. Many of the early Disney films have this structure of putting complex sequences in the middle to puff up the film, putting the plot aside. The scenes involving the villains and the trouble they take to do evil things is very unimportant to me. They appear very little each so that no one gets to be the main antagonist, which gets settled when Geppetto gets eaten by a whale.
The reason the analogy of growth from Pinocchio is resonant has to do with how he steps up to save his father. We never get to see how exactly he ends up inside a whale which is frustrating because the tone of the movie shifts dramatically, although the mediocre level of entertainment stays about the same. Once the characters are inside the whale, which was because of utter luck as they did nothing substantial to find Geppetto, the sequences inside the beast are not that interesting. Other than dancing joyfully, Pinocchio and Geppetto's relationship has had no development up to this point, which is what the middle portion of the picture should have been doing, and never finishes doing because there are only twenty minutes left for the characters to get out of a whale. Just like Snow White (again), Pinocchio dies and is resurrected in the end, only to give a fake shock to children from the 1940s. The ending happens so fast that the Blue Fairy doesn't even appear physically to turn Pinocchio into a real boy, and at that point, he and Geppetto do the only thing they know how to do: dance together joyfully. Jiminy awkwardly lowers the curtain. He is the only character with an interesting personality, being an insect added for comedic relief in pre-production, incidentally establishing a common trope of happy-go-lucky sidekicks such as Mushu and Zazu, and he doesn't even get to sing the final song.
When my brother was four, my mother used to play him Pinocchio so that he would fall asleep. To this day he denies having ever seen it, and so does my mother. I have seen it a couple of times, and even to do this review it took me a couple of sits because I kept getting sleepy, I don't know why. It is nocturnal and small and kicks off with two sequences of characters going to bed. Later on, I have trouble engaging further. Pinocchio is a flat character, way too naive to be relatable to any kid today. Geppetto is not given much to do either. One of his only motifs is repeated three times, where he will witness Pinocchio doing something and will not acknowledge it for a bit until he jumps out all surprised. This is not funny, or useful, and feels even less realistic than getting stuck inside a whale. There are aspects to admire about the animation breakthroughs, be it of water or light. The depressing atmosphere provides scary moments in good conscience like the scene where kids turn into donkeys for misbehaving. This is also based on a pun, and even though is quite a frightening sequence, it is an arbitrary use of magic to punish children, who should be treated as the victims of misleading adults. It also breaks with the idea that the miracle it took to create a living puppet is not an everyday occurrence, since magic events seem to be happening left and right. Overall, I just find it to be inconsistent. Besides several decent jokes, little bits of animation, universal themes, and recognizable concepts, Pinocchio very forcibly takes the title character through a cohesive moral overcoming, has a contorted pace that makes it feel like it ends abruptly, and most of it is hard to even get at in the first place if I fall asleep every time I see the opening 20 minutes.
6/10.
