Pinocchio do what makes you happy

Stromboli does disturb a viewer today, however, for it is simply impossible to ignore the anti-Semitic implications of his characterization. And it is all the more disturbing when one thinks of the period in which the film was made and the anti-Semitism that was being spread like a plague in Europe by Hitler's Nazi Reich. Like the few other female presences in the film--Cleo, Geppetto's flirty, long-lashed fish, or the dancing girl puppets in Stromboli's Marionette Theater, who wear various national costumes as if they are contestants in a Miss World beauty pageant--the Blue Fairy is an utterly stereotypical feminine figure whose role, although ostensibly central in making Pinocchio come to life as a puppet and again as a real boy, is actually quite marginal in terms of actual screen time and impact.

Completely antithetical to Collodi's deeply mysterious and manipulative Blue Fairy, Disney's is a 's "glamour girl" who is a solid, shapely human presence rather than an ethereal apparition. She is a "deus ex machina" who enters the scene early on to grant "good Geppetto" his wish made upon a star that the puppet become "real.

Nor does Disney's Fairy function in any sense as a mother figure; she certainly does not look motherly at all, but has the appearance more like that of a Hollywood starlet. Her sole function in Disney's version is as a magic presence that can get Pinocchio out of apparently hopeless fixes; this means that she flits in and out of the film with no deeper resonance than an inanimate magic wand or potion would have.

Her single goal is to get Pinocchio to be a good, obedient boy, back in the warm protection of Geppetto's fatherly space, where mothers are simply not needed, just as femaleness in any form Cleo the fish, the seductive marionettes is shown to be primarily decorative, the equivalent of the dumb blond or "bimbo" of Hollywood manufacture.

Discussion Cartoons often preserve the racial and gendered stereotypes e. Should such cartoons be censored today, and would you make the same recommendation for works of literature? If my comments on Disney's Pinocchio seem to be primarily negative, I wish to temper that impression by stating that in fact I find the film to be a remarkable technical achievement and a truly fascinating work. It is not only highly engaging and entertaining; it is also a rich cultural document, due mainly to its "hidden" or subtextual elements that reveal, perhaps unwittingly, artistic and social models, prejudices and stereotypes of the period in which it was made that were both collective, and specific to Disney.

This, I think, is also the case with Collodi's tale, indeed with any work that resonates more deeply than lesser works of merely superficial appeal. If the subtexts generated by Stromboli and the Blue Fairy suggest the negative Jewish and female models that had thoroughly permeated American culture and society by the era in which Disney was making his film the late s , there is, on the other hand, an element introduced very early on in the film that I find charmingly yet not at all simplistically positive.

It is one that in fact transcends historical and cultural prejudices and reaches into the heart of artistic creativity. Just as some literary works are metaliterary--that is, they contain writing about writing itself, and about their own themes and structures--so too films can be and often are metafilmic.

A famous example is Fellini's Otto e mezzo , in which a director is trying to make a film that ends up being the film we are watching. Animated features are not often thought of as metafilmic, yet Disney's Pinocchio is just that.

It is an animated film in which the main character is precisely a non-human who is animated , thus becoming a simulated "human.

In Geppetto's workshop we see what is in effect a pre-filmic world of animation in which little carved mechanical figures are made to move, just as drawn figures will be made to move on the screen. The anthropomorphic characterizations of animals--Figaro the cat, Cleo the fish, the Fox and, first and foremost, Jiminy Cricket--represent another crossing of lines, this time between the animal or insect and the human.

Puppetry, the dominant technique of animation inscribed into the story, is, of course, embodied in Pinocchio himself, but in addition we have Stromboli's marionettes, which function as another layer of self-conscious commentary on the animation of objects in human form.

With Pinocchio , Disney and his team of dedicated artists were not only creating simulated humans on screen, they were also revealing something of the fascination that such animation exercises perhaps as much on its creators as on those who enjoy the fruits of their labors. However, there is a dark side to this urge to create life even if only simulated life. Geppetto is the version in bono of the artist as benevolent God; there are no more charming scenes than those in which his many humanoid creations come to life, or those in which we witness his delight in his "son," Pinocchio, even before the puppet has been given independent voice and movement by the Blue Fairy.

Stromboli is the version in malo , however. He is the evil puppetmaster God who creates the illusion of life only for personal gain and glory. The ancient theme of the dangers of hubristic creativity hovers around this film, but there is also inscribed into it the sheer joy of creation that seeks to animate lifeless things and to endow all objects and animals with such "human" qualities as the capacity to love and to live with conscious pleasure and direction.

The fascinating question of what constitutes the boundary between humans and non- or post-humans informs Spielberg's film, A. I: Artificial Intelligence. At the beginning of this essay I quoted from the review by David Denby in The New Yorker in which the critic does not have many good things to say about the film. Other review articles, in the British film magazine Sight and Sound and in The New York Review of Books , are more positive and bring out issues that are tied to some of those that I have discussed in my consideration of Pinocchio.

In addition to the explicit references to the tale of Pinocchio in the film--the human mother reads the puppet's story to her robot or "mecha" son, who then decides he wants to be human and, upon his expulsion from the home, has a series of Pinocchio-like negative adventures as he searches for the Blue Fairy--it is possible to read the film, like Disney's Pinocchio , as another "metafilm.

Now that we have the technology what are we going to use it for? This "technology" of creation generates some of the same ethical and philosophical concerns that now whirl around the advances in science that permit babies to be created in test tubes and animals to be cloned. In the original Collodi tale, in Disney's film, and in A. Collodi's Geppetto wants his puppet to help him make a living, Disney's Geppetto wants his puppet to give him companionship and love, and Spielberg's mecha, David, is created specifically and uniquely in order to love his human parents unconditionally.

Geppetto is a craftsman, allied to the tradition of poeisis or creativity to which artists belong, while the mecha's creator, Dr. Hobby, is a scientist although a "poetic" one who wants to make a robot who can "chase down his dreams". Nonetheless, they are, artists or scientists, all figures of the male creator who appropriates the procreativity of the maternal realm as they singlehandedly "give birth to" their "sons," effectively excluding women from their worlds except in highly idealized and symbolic, rather than active, roles.

In these narratives, discuss the role of woman as mother figure. How do the reactions of the creations to their creators differ? Hoberman calls "an obscure moral objection" to Hobby's creation of "a robot child with a love that will never end," Hobby's reply is "Didn't God create Adam to love him?

In fact, the mecha David is also expelled from Eden, and he futilely looks for the fictional character Blue Fairy to make him a "real boy" so that his mother will want him back. Eden regained is an impossible goal, however, and the most David can have is one perfect day with a reconstituted simulacrum of his mother.

Conclusion In my reading of Collodi's tale and its many "heirs" in subsequent fictional and filmic works, I have sought to bring out elements that make of the story of Pinocchio much more than a simplistic lesson in the importance of obedience and conformity. The ever valid question of how and to what end human beings are created and shaped is rendered even more complex by a consideration of the role of the feminine symbolic as it complicates what is and remains in most cultures and most eras a fundamentally patriarchal view of creation.

I believe that it is not insignificant that the most anodyne reworkings of Pinocchio elide the complex figure of the Blue Fairy, while the more thought-provoking uses of the tale as seen in Manganelli's work, or Spielberg's film highlight the female principle in a worldview that is nonetheless still fundamentally patriarchal, be it the nineteenth-century Italy of Collodi or the futuristic West of Spielberg and of Kubrick, of course.

Human creativity, whether an art, a craft, or a technology, can yield astounding results, but the power to bring into being real or simulated versions of ourselves is fraught with dangers, not the least of which is the illusion of total control over the creatures we make.

The anomalous, the abject, or the sheer excess of individual desire--all historically associated with the feminine sphere--cannot be tamed or repressed merely by admonishments to conform to the Law of the Father, to be "good little boys.

Collodi enlisted the aid of the feminine in the taming of the puppet, but it is worth remembering that, at the end of the tale, the Blue Fairy only appears in a dream to Pinocchio, as the perfect mother he would wish her to be. What or who in fact she may truly be or truly desire is known only to her.

Similarly, the mecha David is "reunited" briefly with the mother of his dreams at the end of A. Pinocchio's and David's "dreams come true," as Disney's Jiminy Cricket so movingly sings, but at what price?

Who put these dreams of perfect goodness and filial bonding into their heads? In reality, boys' dreams of idealized mother figures might be comforting to them, but the dreams of their fathers or father figures who are avid for total control of their sons--effectively the motherless puppets that male children so often are in societies and cultures in which the feminine symbolic is radically marginalized--can be, if realized, our worst nightmares come to life.

Browse the Archive Search by Keyword. In an essentially negative review, published on July 2, , in The New Yorker , film critic David Denby writes: The story is based explicitly in "Pinocchio," but it gives us a queasy feeling from the beginning. Have the filmmakers forgotten that Pinocchio is a scamp? He's disobedient and lazy, he lies, he has a nose that rather famously gets longer. Pinocchio wants to be a real person because he's tired of being knocked around as a puppet. He is redeemed by love for his wood-carver "father" just at the very end of the tale p.

I would wager that this fairly simplistic reading of Pinocchio is based more on memories of Disney's version than on the original tale, published first in serial form and then as a book in In Collodi's more complex story, there are many stimuli for "queasy feelings" as well as for other diverse emotional and intellectual responses, which careful readers, including prominent Italian and American authors, have experienced and used in order to shape Pinocchios of their own.

Was the original Pinocchio merely a "scamp" who was simply "redeemed" by his putative father? Did he wish to be a real person only because "he was tired of being knocked around as a puppet?

The beloved story of Pinocchio has not only entertained generations of children around the world it is topped in worldwide sales only by the Bible ; it has also provided fuel for many Italian and other writers of adult fiction and has been the inspiration for cinematic references that are instantly recognizable more than years since Collodi first created the puppet. A contemporary archetype, the long-nosed, not quite human boy figure has entered into global popular culture how many countless Pinocchio puppets, toys, statues, cartoons, references in ads and so on must there now exist?

Pino Funnel. Photo by Dan Dry. This funnel was designed for the Alessi Corporation, which is known for its whimsical and innovative kitchen implements.

Versions of Pinocchio are to be found everywhere, as wooden toys, Murano glass statues, dolls, and the like, and there are numerous websites devoted to the puppet. There were many programs initiated after unification with the goal of "making the Italian people Italian," but in spite of his interest in pedagogical writing, Collodi was highly suspicious of them because he saw them as a threat to individuality and personal freedom.

These clashes within Collodi find expression in his tale of Pinocchio, which it is possible to read as a tale of both transgression and the necessity for conformity. European romanticism and children's literature The emergence of the category of children's literature in the nineteenth century is not confined to Italy, of course.

European romanticism brought together an interest in children with a passion for popular literary forms and for mythic themes and structures. Pinocchio is a case in point. It relies heavily on the Tuscan novella or short-story tradition to which Boccaccio's Decameron belongs, and also on classical sources, such as Homer and Dante. As the critic Glauco Cambon wrote: "Storytelling is a folk art in the Tuscan countryside, and has been for centuries Pinocchio 's relentless variety of narrative incident, its alertness to social types, its tongue-in-cheek wisdom are of a piece with that illustrious tradition" p.

Further, Cambon highlights as well the importance of the Odyssey , the Aeneid , and the Divine Comedy to the structure and style of Pinocchio and concludes: "In a place like Italy, the cultural background would insure a deep response to this aspect of Collodi's myth, and guarantee its authenticity" pp.

From its initial publication to today, the puppet's tale has been read and enjoyed by audiences of children and adults, both of which find different pleasures in it. Sergio Strizzi Roberto Benigni in his self-directed Pinocchio. SESSION 4 : Pinocchio and "Serious" Fiction Collodi's tale of Pinocchio may have fairy tale-like qualities that tie it to the genre of children's literature, but many of its elements are more allied to the tradition of adult, "serious" prose fiction.

Illustrations by Ugo Fleres for the serial publication of Pinocchio in the Giornale per i bambini , from the appendix to Perella's translated and annotated edition of the tale. In Ugo Fleres's first illustrations of the tale, which were published along with it in the Giornale per i bambini , we see how puppet-like Pinocchio is, in contrast to Disney's and other later conceptions, in which he is much more like a boy even before his transformation into a fully human being.

Discussion The mysterious Blue Fairy in Pinocchio offers fertile ground for scholars to debate her ambiguous role in the story. Discuss the strengths or weaknesses of the various readings presented in this session e. Which reading do you feel holds the most merit, and why? As Tommasi also notes, Geppetto's home is just the right sort of place between the real and the fantastic for such a birth to occur, since it is a humble abode with real, broken-down, meager furnishings but embellished with a painted fire and a painted kettle steaming away on the back wall.

It is a liminal space, betwixt and between reality and fantasy, a "limen" or threshold on one side of which is potentiality and on the other, actualization. Giovani : What is your name boy? Pinocchio : Pinocchio. My name is Pinocchio. Giovani : Come here, Pinocchio. I need a good firewood to cook my meat.

Pinocchio : Help me, father. Giovani : Go now, or I will change my mind. Now I have to eat half cook meat. Pinocchio cries. A fairy hears him and help him. Fairy : What are you doing there? Are you tricked by the fox bandit? Pinocchio : No, I just lost them from my pocket. Fairy : You tell a lie. I know it because your nose will stretch as you lie.

Be honest young boy. Carlo : Hei Pinocchio, I hear that there is a toyland. We can paly all day there. Pinocchio : Do such a place really exist? Carlo : Yes, a wagon will bring me there this evening. Would you like to go with me? Pinocchio : Of course. I will go with you. In the evening, Carlo and Pinocchio go to the toyland. Pinocchio : This is really exist. Pinocchio : Yes Carlo, Thank to you. Pinocchio : What I have done, I broke my promise and now I will die.

Geppetto : Help. Is there anybody can help me? Pinocchio : Father. Scream Geppetto : Is that you Pinocchio? Geppetto : Well. I think we should get out of this whale right now. Pinocchio : We are out now father. Pinocchio : Hold me father. I will bring you home. The fairy comes. Fairy : When a bad boy can be a good boy.

Their looks can change too. Geppetto : Thank you fairy. Pinocchio : Thank you fairy. I will try to be a good boy. Fairy : I hope so. Then, that is Pinocchio changes into a real boy and life with his father. Minat Terkait Pinokio. Populer di The Adventures Of Pinocchio. Byron Valdivieso. Walter Romeo. Mel Vinz. Children's Theatre Company. Manya Pant Tiwari. Putu Adhi Rama Wijaya. The movie has positive messages and role models, but there are also many dark, disturbing, sad, scary, violent and mature themes and scenes.

These themes and scenes make the movie unsuitable for children under five years, and we recommend parental guidance for children under nine years. Values in this movie that you could reinforce with your children include honesty, courage, selflessness and friendship. The movie also emphasises the importance of being guided by your conscience. This movie could also give you the chance to talk with your children about the real-life consequences of things like:.

Skip to content Skip to navigation. Story Woodworker Geppetto voiced by Christian Rub is delighted when the Blue Fairy voiced by Evelyn Venable grants him his wish, and his masterpiece, a wooden marionette, comes to life. Themes Disney classic; fantasy; adventure; right versus wrong; friendship Violence Pinocchio has some violence.

Stromboli, the manager of a puppet show, threatens to turn Pinocchio into firewood and locks him up in a cage. Once at Pleasure Island, the recruited boys are turned into donkeys and sold to the salt mines or the circus.