- Maria Truglio
Disney’s Zany Pinocchio: Adapting Pinocchio to Film
Pinocchio seems to be having a “moment.” The stringless puppet with the growing nose, created by Italian author Carlo Collodi in 1881, has inspired innumerable translations, adaptations, and sequels over the years. The past year alone has proven the enduring appeal of the wooden boy. 2021 saw a new English translation of the novel by John Hooper and Anna Kraczyna (Penguin), and 2022 gave us two film adaptations: a Netflix stop-action version co-directed and co-written by Guillermo del Toro, and a Disney+ live-action version directed by Robert Zemeckis. Neither of these remediations seek to reproduce faithfully Collodi’s text, thus a critique based on fidelity would not be productive. Rather, I suggest here how certain differences between the adaptations and their source text can tell us something about our own historical moment, especially in regard to childhood. Unlike Collodi’s original, Disney’s latest film shields the child from the harsh realities of poverty and instead leans into consumerism and spectacle rather than encourage reflection and contemplation.
Disney’s new Pinocchio, which revisits its classic 1940 animated film, takes the old story in some bold and welcome new directions. Cynthia Erivo in the role of the blue fairy and a new character who uses a prosthetic device, for example, both move toward much needed inclusivity in children’s films. At the same time, the film is at pains to announce it roots in the 19th-century Italian novel, nodding toward its source text more overtly than did the 1940 version. Characters with clearly Italian-accented speech, reference to the town of Siena, and a landscape of cobblestone roads and Italian architecture all celebrate the Tuscan culture of the original novel (as Hooper and Kraczyna point out, the growing threat of fascism in 1940 may account for the erasure of the Italian setting in the first Disney film (x)). More subtly, the movie ends with the image of a story book and its fleetingly visible Italian text, reminding viewers of the literary origins of the tale. And perhaps as a wink to some adult viewers, the author’s name itself appears: “Collodi” is the brand of soap emblazoned on the soapbox which appropriately serves as Jiminy Cricket’s perch. The film, then, courts audience approval through appeals to its authenticity and through leveraging America’s general Italophilia (with Italy itself as a kind of cipher for “old timey” and “authentic”).
At the same time, the film also consistently departs from that source text, staking its own claims about childhood. Indeed, while the Italian text that closes the film generates an authenticity effect, it simultaneously confirms the film’s difference, since the sentence “quoted” there – “Nel suo cuore, Pinocchio è reale come ogni vero ragazzo potrebbe mai essere” [In his heart, Pinocchio is as real as any real boy could be] - does not appear anywhere in Collodi’s novel. The ways in which the film differs from the novel, including its significant shortening of time, the erasure of poverty, and its use of self-references, suggest a different view of childhood, and, I believe, implicitly contribute to the overall negative reception of the film (such as here).
Remarkably, the main action of the film unfolds within the incredible time span of one day. Geppetto himself expresses his awe over the frenetic pace of events. This absurd condensation of time, heightened by specific scenes in which high-speed motion is thematized, as when Pinocchio dances so fast that the stage catches fire, or uses his legs as a propeller to power the boat away from the shark, generates a truly frantic feel to the film. On the one hand, this frenetic energy echoes Collodi’s Pinocchio, whose boundless energy and impulsivity propel him through the multiple episodes of his adventures. The zaniness that emerges from Disney’s new version, in addition, responds to the Commedia dell’arte tradition embodied in the characters of Harlequin and the other puppets that Pinocchio meets at Mangiafoco’s theatre. The slapstick comedy of the zanni or servant figures from the Commedia dell’arte gives us the word “zany.” However, for Collodi, as a counter to this zaniness, patience emerges as a core lesson of the novel. In one scene, Pinocchio spends a whole night with his foot stuck in the Blue Fairy’s door as he waits for the snail to descend the stairs and let him in. He spends four months in jail as punishment for having been robbed. And, after saving Geppetto from the shark, he must work for more than five months turning a windlass (moving slowly and laboriously in circles, rather than running off) to earn a glass a milk each day for his father. Only then is he granted “real” boyhood. The story itself takes place over the course of many months rather than the absurd one day remarked upon by Hanks’ Geppetto, consistently reinforcing the need to learn patience.
Geppetto’s character as well departs significantly from Collodi’s rendition, most notably in his middle-class status. Collodi’s Geppetto is desperately poor – so much so that he must sell his threadbare jacket to be able to buy Pinocchio his spelling book, and he attempts to quell his persistent hunger with a painting of a fireplace and kettle on the wall since he cannot afford a real one. Disney erases this poverty to offer instead the image of a cozy home of a well-off artisan. This home, furthermore, boasts a vast collection of cuckoo-clocks. As the clocks go off simultaneously, a vast array of figures emerges, singing and dancing. The viewer quickly notices that many of the figures are in fact characters from other Disney films. This gesture of self-referentiality (typical of Disney) clearly serves a self-congratulatory function. As the array of familiar characters erupt onto the screen, the film invites viewers to recall their favorite Disney “classics,” creating a kind of product placement moment. Here again, the film puts a different spin on a similar moment in Collodi’s novel. Famously, in Chapter 36 of the novel, Collodi references several of his own previous books, specifically scholastic texts he had penned. But he does so in a humorously self-critical way: the books are so dull that even the fish refuse to eat them. The scene is typically read as an element of Collodi’s satirical critique of the fledgling education system in Italy.
Taken together, the repression of poverty, the gestures of product placement, and the compressed timeline and other “zany” qualities of the film all contribute to the film’s construction of its child viewers. This child, then, must be shielded from realities such as hunger (perhaps the central theme of Collodi’s tale) and economic inequality. Instead, the child viewer is envisioned fundamentally as a consumer, dissuaded from reflection and contemplation, and for whom Pinocchio’s “ludic yet noticeably stressful” zaniness is offered as a spectacle (Ngai 8). In this light, it is perhaps encouraging that the film has not met with much approval.
REFERENCES
Collodi, Carlo. The Adventures of Pinocchio. Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by John Hooper and Anna Kracyna. Penguin 2021.
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard University Press. 2012.
The following podcast provides an informal discussion of Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) in contrast to the Disney film:
Content advisory warning: adult language.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Maria Truglio received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University. She is Professor of Italian and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State (University Park). Her research investigates Italian literature from the nineteenth century to the present day with attention to questions of gender and national identity formation. She focuses on the field of children’s literature, bringing psychoanalytic, post-structuralist, and postcolonial methodologies to bear on texts written for young people from the unification period forward. Her first book, Beyond the Family Romance: The Legend of Pascoli (U of Toronto P, 2007) examined the works of the canonical Symbolist poet Giovanni Pascoli through a psychoanalytic lens, with attention to his conception of childhood. Her monograph Italian Children’s Literature and National Identity: Childhood, Melancholy, Modernity (Routledge, 2017) analyzed books for young readers in the period between unification and fascism (1861-1922). With Nicolás Fernández-Medina she co-edited the volume Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy (Routledge, 2016), which includes her discussion of Massimo Bontempelli's 1922 magical realist children's book. She is now researching how contemporary Italian children’s literature ascribes meanings to the “Mediterranean migration crisis” in light of Italy’s postcolonial context, and contributed an essay on this topic to the Children's Literature Association Quarterly special issue on refugees.