Pinocchio in Film
| ted to bring Collodi's tale to the screen, including Federico Fellini and Francis Ford Coppola. Neither ever did, although Fellini's final film, La voce della luna, starring Roberto Benigni, has overt allusions to the puppet's story. Other directors did make their versions of Pinocchio, whether in animation, with live actors, or a mix of the two, and there are at least 14 English-language films based on the tale, not to mention the Italian, French, Russian, German, Japanese and many other versions for the big screen and for television. Japanese anime cartoons owe a particular debt to Pinocchio, for Astroboy, one of the most popular figures of the genre, is based on the Italian puppet. Although Collodi did not provide a detailed description either of the appearance of his characters or of the settings, from its birth in serial form the tale has stimulated an extraordinarily rich illustrative tradition that in turn has nourished numerous cinematographic representations. Director and actor Roberto Benigni's film version of the tale, in which he will star as the puppet, is currently being awaited with great anticipation. In an interview given February 7, 2001, with the founding editor of La Repubblica, Eugenio Scalfari, which is now available on the newspaper's website, Benigni speaks with ecstatic enthusiasm about the project that has been a dream of his for many years. He did not read Collodi's tale until he was 20 years old, he says, nor could his parents have read it to him when he was a child because they were illiterate Tuscan peasants. But as a child Benigni was aware of the existence of the puppet nonetheless, because his mother would warn him that if he told lies his nose would grow like Pinocchio's and then Dante Alighieri would put him in Hell: Then one day in the piazza I saw a statue of Dante, and with that nose of his I thought that he was Pinocchio. Later I found a sentence in the Convivio [a work by Dante] that says: "Truly I have been wood [a wooden boat] without direction, carried along by mournful poverty." Can you get more like Pinocchio than that?! With this humorous anecdote, Benigni makes clear just how strong a connection he perceives between the high-cultural reference par excellence--Dante--and Collodi's more humble but no less culturally important figure. The actor-director also comments on "how many beautiful things this puppet has caused to be written," mentioning the philosopher Benedetto Croce (who wrote that Pinocchio's essence is the "wood of humanity"), Calvino, Antonio Gramsci, writer-critic Pietro Citati, Marxist critic Alberto Asor Rosa and Giorgio Manganelli, the last of whom he calls "the funniest pinocchiologist of them all." Benigni's joy in working on his film version of the tale comes through very strongly in this interview, and his comments whet our appetite for the result of his long meditations on the beloved puppet. If anyone can succeed in bringing Pinocchio to full filmic life with accuracy and verve, it is this highly talented and sensitive fellow Tuscan, who is already known affectionately as "Pinocchio" for his antics on and off the screen.One of the most recent American productions of the tale is the1996 film The Adventures of Pinocchio, starring Martin Landau as Geppetto and Jonathan Taylor-Thomas as the "real boy" Pinocchio. The pre-human puppet in the mixed animated-live action sequences is the creation of Jim Henson's Creature Workshop (of Sesame Street fame). The New Adventures of Pinocchio, a sequel, was released in October 2001. The 1996 film follows Collodi's tale fairly closely, although there are some interesting changes. Set in a vaguely eighteenth-century Italy, with the villains often looking like Venetian carnival characters, from the very beginning the film is oriented much more to sentimentality than is Collodi's tale. As the film has it, years before the "birth" of Pinocchio, Geppetto had carved a heart enclosing his and his beloved Leona's initials into a tree in the forest, and it is that piece of wood that contains the magic puppet. Leona had married Geppetto's brother, and so Geppetto pined for her (pun intended!) for 25 years. Pinocchio is, therefore, their "love child," and we know from the start that they will all end up as one happy family. The most obvious modification of Collodi's story is the absence of the Blue Fairy; instead we have the very human Leona (played by Geneviève Bujold), who is a potential mother for the puppet and nothing else. She is a sensible maternal presence, very unlike the mysterious and changeable Blue Fairy. Pinocchio, or "Woody" as he is called by his mischievous human friend Lampwick, learns in school that what separates humans from others is their ability to cry. This lesson comes to life just as Pinocchio does, for it is because of his tears that he is transformed into a real boy. The film is well-crafted but a bit plodding, and the European and American elements in it clash oddly. The talking cricket Pepe, for example, is very American in voice and manner, while the setting and the villains are all Old World. In spite of its shortcomings, however, it is a worthy adaptation to the screen of Collodi's tale. |
|
![[Benigni]](72810000_501.jpg)
