Thursday, April 7, 2011

Book 8: Le Avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1881-83)

"Pinocchio," it turns out, is a fairly big and complex book — not the kid-sized read I thought I could breeze through in half an hour. It's also darker and more surreal than I had imagined. The fairy who watches over Pinocchio, for example, has blue hair and may or may not be dead. She's the "Blue-haired Fairy." In the Disney movie, the "Blue Fairy" is simply a good-lookin' blonde in a blue dress. Go figure. In the movie, Jiminy Cricket plays a prominent role, not only as the narrator but as the conscience of Pinocchio throughout. In the book, Pinocchio murders the interfering cricket immediately because he wants him to shut the hell up.

Pinocchio is a little shit. I don't mean he's merely ornery either. I mean he's a total selfish bastard, whom you don't even feel sorry for when he sleeps too close to the fire and burns his wooden feet off, rendering him immobile. The original drawing of him by Enrico Mazzanti, at left, is far more suggestive of his knavery than Walt Disney's cuddly depiction. Why does Geppetto bother to make this ingrate a new pair of feet? Can't he see Pinocchio will use them not to walk to school like a good little boy but to wreak more havoc? It's textbook codependency.

It's a shame we can't read an original source with our minds absolutely clear of the subsequent, more wildly popular, incarnations. One becomes unduly focused on comparisons — Why was this element left out? Why was that added? Why is this character so different? Why, to provide a specific example, is this profoundly Tuscan setting given an almost Swiss feel in the movie? — instead of just appreciating the original text, which in the case of "Pinocchio" is a truly bizarre and garish dreamscape, rife with sadism and fear, fantastic characters and absurd situations, not the least of which is a puppet who cannot be controlled, even by his own creator.

Carlo Collodi, a journalist from Florence, wrote "Le Avventure di Pinocchio" in the early 1880s as a serialized fairy tale in Italy's first newspaper for children. It was a morality tale about how people — not just children — should behave. They should work for their money rather than expecting handouts or miracles. They should not be the pawns of the rich, nor the dupes of the greedy. They should take care of their relatives. They should be grateful for the good things in life. They should value education. They should be generous. In the original serialized version, Pinocchio is unable to mend his ways and is actually hanged for his failures. There's some nice kid lit for you.

Collodi's editors got him to revisit this outcome, and he ended up adding several chapters, giving us the beloved ending of the wooden puppet whose eventual goodness turns him into a real boy. And presumably he grows up, unlike the Anglo boy par excellence Peter Pan, to be a real man, whose nose — can we assume? — stays the same length whether or not he tells lies.

Apparently the story of Pinocchio did not become an astronomical best-seller until it was translated into English a decade later. Thus Collodi, like many a writer, died never knowing that his creation became one of the most recognized fictional characters in the world. When the movie came out in 1940 — it was only Disney's second full-length feature; the first was "Snow White" — Pinocchio became a household word, and "When You Wish Upon a Star," from its soundtrack, a madly popular tune.

The movie has its own charms — Geppetto's fantastic cat Figaro, for one, who does not appear in the novel — and it does pay homage to Collodi by using the framing device of his book. Jiminy Cricket is seen opening the lavish, heavy tome titled "Pinocchio" to begin his tale, signaling to the audience that the source material is something venerable and antique, i.e., a piece of writing.

My favorite thing from the book may be the "phlegmatic snail." (Do words like "phlegmatic" even appear in children's literature these days? I hope so). The snail is like a lady-in-waiting to the Blue-haired Fairy. Pinocchio shouts up to the fourth-story window where she's sitting. He needs help immediately. She says sure, she'll be right down. Nine hours later she opens the door — vividly illustrating a "snail's pace" and giving Pinocchio a lesson in industry and patience.

Note: When I was looking up information about Collodi, I came across a really interesting article in the New York Review of Books about how Collodi's "Pinocchio" helped shape a national identity after the Italian city states in the mid-19th century unified into the country now known as Italy. "Pinocchio" illustrated something all the diverse regions had in common and could thus rally around: an "irreverent and skeptical pessimism."

12 comments:

  1. Those 19th Century fairy tails are always far more weird and far more interesting than the 20th Century repackaging that Disney and others have given us. Do you suppose that Disney figured Tuscany might play poorly to the anti-Italian sentiments of a lot of Americans? Or that since he started with Germanic story telling with “Snow White”, he ought to keep building that brand?

    “Irreverent and skeptical pessimism” has a certain appeal as an individual trait, but it is perhaps not good soil on which to grow a confident and productive national character.

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  2. Oh, that's a good question. I hadn't thought about the politics and the timing (1940). Maybe there was a deliberate effort to play down the Italian-ness of the story. The setting doesn't look like Florence at all. (Too bad, the domes of Florence would rock in a cartoon.) It looks Alpine. And Geppetto is depicted as a clockmaker, with a ton of cuckoo clocks that certainly add visual interest for the animation (I read that working models of all these clocks were actually built for the animators to draw!), but it's very Swiss-like, not Tuscan. And Jiminy Cricket seems sort of American South! (And he's kind of lecherous). On the other hand, some of the characters have Italian names, like Geppetto and Pinocchio, of course, but also Stromboli, who has a thick Italian accent and even rambles off into actual Italian (or what sounds like Italian). He's a bad guy, though, so maybe they actually played up his Italian-ness! Other characters seem very generic-American. And the blonde Blue Fairy seems very Hollywood American. Hehe. It's an absolute mishmash. I wonder if Disney is so consumed with perfecting the animation, that other details just get overlooked? Or if the default character is American to which you had certain foreign characteristics as you see fit?

    Actually, there was another side to the “irreverent and skeptical pessimism," and that's the elevation/marketing of "The Betrothed" — "I Promessi Sposi" in Italian — as the ultimate Italian novel (I'll be reading this later. It's looooonnnng, and there's a beautiful epigraph from it at the beginning of "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis"). Catholic. Traditional. Noble. It's interesting to me that for all the talk about what constitutes "a good boy" in "Pinocchio" there is absolutely no mention of being religious or patriotic. It's highly secular. It's all about being good to those around you and educating yourself and working hard — for your own sake, not for country or God.

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  3. Stromboli's character in the book is called Mangiafuoco ("Fire-eater"). Why would Disney change that to Stromboli, the name of an Italian food? Is that like calling a Mexican villain "Taco"?

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  4. Wikipedia has stromboli as an American invention from the 1950s and probably named after Rossellini’s 1950 film that is set on the volcanic island named Stromboli.

    If you’ve seen how the animators build up their images in layers, you can imagine that Disney built characters the same way. You might not be far off with the idea that he started with a generic white mid-western American and added or subtracted as needed.

    So is “Pinocchio” focused only personal morals, or does it observe any social ills like, say, corruption?

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  5. Oh, awesome about the stromboli. Wonder where Disney got that name in 1940. Certainly very Italian sounding.

    Oh yeah, "Pinocchio" observes social ills, like predatory greed. I think the insistence on hard work is also commentary on the entitled upper class. In one scene two rogues — a fox and cat — tell Pinocchio that if he plants a few coins in the ground that they will sprout a money tree. He'll be able to lazily sit back and watch it grow — sort of a metaphor for inherited wealth. Another scene has a guy collecting all the lazy little boys and taking them to a special land where they don't have to go to school and can just play all day. Eventually the boys turn into donkeys (asses!) and the guy sells them as beasts of burden. (One of the boys dies a horrible death from over-exertion as a donkey.) The man who buys Pinocchio-turned-donkey plans to skin him to make a drum! So there's plenty about how society is rife with greedy, cruel, exploitative people.

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  6. Weird! Home for lunch just now, and the New Yorker Magazine that just arrived in the mail has a story about the 150th anniversary of Italy's unification (on March 17)! It's actually a look at three recent books about Italy. Do the titles tell you anything?

    "The Failure of Italian Nationhood"

    "Resisting the Tide: Cultures of Opposition under Berlusconi"

    "Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe"

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  7. Yikes, how bleak.

    Disney's "Pinocchio" seriously scared me as a kid. First Stromboli, then the donkey thing (horrifying), then being swallowed by the whale (was that in the book?). A darker, weirder version might give me nightmares.

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  8. Hehe. I don't get the impression that Italians are overly concerned about traumatizing children (based on my limited familiarity!)

    In the book, the whale is "The Terrible Dogfish," a giant sea monster who has asthma. A tunafish who is also stuck in the dogfish's throat tells Pinocchio they just have to resign themselves to being digested and dying. (This, I imagine, is the attitude of much of the Italian peasantry at that time to life's sufferings). Pshaw! Pinocchio finds Geppetto farther down the dogfish's digestive tract and they manage to walk back up to its mouth and escape. Because it has asthma, the dogfish sleeps with its head out of the water! Hehe. The once-resigned tunafish follows them, and they mount his back and are carried to safety. Not weird at all.

    Having it be a whale makes it more biblical maybe?

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  9. Maybe the volcano had just erupted and Stromboli was in the news at the time Disney was making his film. I wonder if he used a whale because of a desire to make a religious connection to the Bible or just because it made the scene feel more familiar because he could count on Americans all knowing the Bible tale? It could have just been part of the effort of toning down the weirdness like swapping out blue hair for a blue dress.

    That book “Failure of Italian Nationhood” sounds like it might be an interesting read. I’ve been seeing a few things lately about the anniversary of unification.

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  10. but the story is really dark he keeps on getting tortured and then he gets hanged

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