Audiences are probably much more taken with the wonderful score, the strikingly human-like characters (with perfectly chosen voices), and the allusions to recognizable types from high as well as popular culture than with the film's technical innovations, which they may or may not notice. As for its music, we remember that the film won Oscars for Best Original Score and Best Song, the unforgettable "When You Wish Upon a Star." And, as for characters: by paring down the large cast of characters in the original book to a few well-drawn (in all senses of the word) good and bad types--the kindly Geppetto, the adorable innocent Pinocchio, the All-American hayseed Jiminy Cricket, the luscious Blue Fairy, Geppetto's darling, very humanized pet cat Figaro and flirty pet fish Cleo, pitted against the rapacious fox Little John, the gross puppetmaster Stromboli, the sadistic Dickensian Foulfellow, the terrifying whale Monstro--Disney offers a genuine morality tale in which Good triumphs over Evil, according to the fairly saccharine code expressed primarily by the Blue Fairy: "Prove yourself brave, useful and truthful"; "A body who won't be good may just as well be made of wood"; "Give a bad boy enough room and he'll soon make a jackass of himself"; "When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are," and so on. It may be that children continue to enjoy the film because, as film critic Roger Ebert states, "all children want to become real and doubt they can," so that they identify strongly with Pinocchio's wish to become a real boy. (I quote from the Web page of the Chicago Sun-Times; however, Ebert's essay on Disney's Pinocchio is now available in his 2002 book, The Great Movies.)

Or, I would suggest that it may be that young viewers respond most to the film's deeply frightening aspects that have something of the primal about them, as do classical fairy tales that enthrall kids over and over. I myself remember being haunted for a very long time by the wicked stepmother and the horrible witch of Snow White, and by the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. I did not "identify with" Snow White or Dorothy, though; in fact I wanted to be a witch, and I now think that what I really wanted was her power over others and her deliciously transgressive way of life. It may be that something like this attraction to the transgressive pulls children into Pinocchio's story, not because they want him or themselves to be "real," but because they relish his brushes with danger and death, vicariously thrilling to experiences that are otherwise out of their reach.

	Discussion
	Do you feel that it is the transgressive or dark nature of the fairy tales, such as Pinocchio, that keep the stories current?

In a richly informative book containing marvelous illustrations, Walt Disney and Europe: European Influences on the Animated Feature Films of Walt Disney, author Robin Allan describes the less than sunny aspects of Disney's Pinocchio in a chapter called, appropriately enough, "The Dark World of Pinocchio." Although I think that Allan is wrong when he calls Collodi's book a work of "homiletic Victorian values," he is right on the mark when he writes that "the darkness of [a complex and frightening] world forms the central bleakness of the film and this is, for all its adaptation, the strongest link between Disney and Collodi" (p. 73). By "all its adaptation," Allan is referring to the ways in which Collodi's story had already been mediated by earlier bowdlerlized versions of the book (alterations and adaptations that had, over the years, shortened the tale and often removed some of its darker episodes), versions that in turn had provided the basis for a play by Yasha Frank that was performed in Los Angeles in 1937 and subsequently published in 1939. Frank's Pinocchio was an innocent, incapable of promoting mischief, unlike Collodi's puppet, who has a seemingly natural attraction to transgressive and delinquent behavior.

Disney followed adaptations much more than the original, as he modified the sadism and violence in order to bring to the screen a lovable, cuddly Pinocchio. Nonetheless, as Allan writes, "the film is dark in content and in presentation, with 76 of its 88 minutes taking place at night or under water" (p. 67). The Disney movie is an odd blend of its European origin and American elements--in the latter case, the most important of which is the Will Rogers-type hobo, Jiminy Cricket--and its Old World cultural referents dominate the ultimately unsuccessful Americanization of the tale: for example, Commedia dell'Arte characters upon which the Fox and his stupid sidekick Cat are based; the Dickensian Foulfellow who shanghais Pinocchio to Pleasure Island; and the setting itself, which has the look of a Bavarian or Austrian Alpine village, the result of the work of Swedish artist Gustaf Tenngren who came to the Disney studios a few years before the film was made.

One of the most disturbing Old World characterizations in Disney's film is that of the greedy puppetmaster Stromboli, who is quite obviously portrayed as a Jewish gypsy, in spite of his stereotypically broad Italian accent. Collodi's puppetmaster Mangiafuoco "seems a fearful man but deep down he isn't bad," nor does he have any sort of marked ethnic or racial identity. From an anti-Semitic perspective, Stromboli's gross facial features and his long black beard are recognizably Jewish, as is his excessive love of wealth. Critic William Paul has suggested that Stromboli is "a burlesque of a Hollywood boss.... Disney's own relationship to the Hollywood power structure was always a difficult one" (quoted in Allan, p. 87). Richard Schickel was the first critic to bring a clear charge of anti-Semitism to the film in his 1968 book Walt Disney, although some of Disney's closest colleagues were Jewish and insisted that they were unaware of any prejudice on his part. 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. g" (to return to critic David Denby's comment), if much less deeply disturbing, characterization is that of Disney's Blue Fairy. 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 1930'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." She utters the magic words "Little puppet wake, the gift of life is thine," and the already humanoid and very cuddly puppet Pinocchio begins to move and talk, thus completely eliding the line between the human and non-human, unlike Collodi's tale in which Pinocchio's emergence from a talking piece of wood emphasizes his non-human status (as do the earliest illustrations to the book). 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.g., bloodthirsty Indians, bumbling Japanese soldiers, lazy Mexicans) of the period in which they were made. {Dis: 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 1930s), 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." This theme is highlighted very strikingly in the lengthy sequences in Geppetto's cottage that focus on the numerous clocks and toys that he has carved, which all depict simulated human animation, thus crossing the boundary between the human and the non-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.