For all the filmgoers who complain that there is nothing to see, there is a genuine American masterpiece on the screens this summer.
It isn`t ”Lethal Weapon 3,” ”Housesitter” or even ”Batman Returns.” It`s ”Pinocchio,” an animated cartoon created 52 years ago by Walt Disney and now reissued in a magnificently restored new version, with its radiant colors and proper screen ratio revived for the first time in two generations.
Not only does the film`s burnished gold and blue color scheme have a new luster, but details previously buried under decades of grime-such as the tidy box that Geppetto`s cat, Figaro, keeps next to his bed-have reappeared.
”Pinocchio” is a great movie not because it is sweet and naive and sentimental (it is, in fact, seldom any of those things), but because it embodies the complex vision of the complex individual who created it.
Despite his primitive politics and frequent faults of taste, Disney remains one of the foremost interpreters of the American experience, as well as, in his later years, one of its primary shapers.
That experience, as developed in ”Pinocchio” and the other classic Disney features, is very far removed from the Norman Rockwell ideal of small town tranquility and understanding. It involves, instead, a terrifying familiarity with pain, loss and death, relieved only occasionally by moments of warmth, humor and music. There are more rainsoaked nights and claustrophic interiors in ”Pinocchio” than in many films noirs, and the transformation of Pinocchio`s pal Lampwick into a braying donkey is a moment any horror film would envy.
Disney`s critics, among them psychologist Bruno Bettleheim, habitually accused him of taking the sting and subtext out of the European fairy tales he adapted for his thoroughly American work-of substituting sweetness and light for the themes of violence and sexuality that run through the original tellings of ”Snow White” or ”Sleeping Beauty.”
Leaving aside the fact that a literal adaptation of the Grimm`s ”Snow White,” with its savage violence and menstrual imagery, would chalk up an immediate NC-17, it is hardly true that Disney has whitewashed the European originals. Instead, he has moved their anxieties to another plane, less mythical and social, more modern and individualistic.
Though most of his tales retain their vague ”Mittel-European” settings, Disney has stripped away the support system that backs them up-the consoling sense of extended family, ongoing tradition and a rigid social structure. In Disney`s desolate American landscape, nothing is set and nothing is certain.
As symbolized by the death or absence of the mother (the most consistent theme in Disney`s plots), this lack of a safe, reliable, protective structure leaves Disney`s protagonists in a state of dangerous freedom, where it is left to them to choose between right and wrong, between self-indulgence and self-control, between individual and group values.
Like the Sorcerer`s Apprentice in ”Fantasia,” Disney`s adolescent protagonists are capable only of learning from experience, not from the abstract moral dictates laid down by authority figures. As a result, they must experience horror and loss for themselves, and learn the consequences of their moral choices at first hand.
Less the puritan he is routinely accused of being (in ”Pinocchio,”
Jiminy Cricket has plenty of randy asides), Disney seems more like a naive American existentialist, rejecting tradition and authority and looking to the individual to discover meaning through experience.
”Pinocchio” is probably Disney`s most complete statement of his instinctive philosophy, and much of the movie`s enduring power, over both adults and children, lies in the force and clarity of its proposals. It is a film that seems to speak to the subconscious, using the cartoon form to bypass inhibiting, adult standards of realism.
Not that the film is pure fantasy. In its understanding of developmental psychology, ”Pinocchio” seems almost scholarly, depicting a whole range of childhood relationships with tremendous accuracy-the sibling rivalry between Pinocchio and his predecessors in Geppetto`s affections, the
cat Figaro and the goldfish Cleo; the distance of the father, who sends Pinocchio off to school on the very morning of his birth; the fear of and fascination with the opposite sex, as wittily depicted through the entangling female marionettes of the ”No Strings on Me” number.
Most important, there is the film`s fine sense of the drama and horror of the adolescent body, prone at any moment to generate strange new organs such as donkey ears and long, flowering noses. It`s suggestive that changes in the body are presented as the consequences of misbehavior (lying or carousing), as if the process of becoming an adult were a form of punishment.
With the psychological reference points in place-established during a remarkably prolonged but absolutely necessary 30-minute opening sequence-Disney moves on to create a moral fable, less in the tradition of fairy tales than the picaresque novel as epitomized by Cervantes (almost certainly a source for Collodi, the author of the Italian novel upon which the film is based). With Jiminy Cricket playing a wary Sancho Panza to Pinocchio`s venturesome Don Quixote, the pair embarks on a series of three adventures, each with its individual lesson.
Systematically ignoring the advice of Jiminy-his completely irrelevant
”official conscience”-Pinocchio leaves home three times, first to experience the horrors of the working world (an actor in a marionette theater, he is ruthlessly exploited by his boss), then to experience the excesses of leisure (on a ”Pleasure Island” that eerily anticipates Disney`s theme parks) and finally to grasp the value of self-sacrifice, in trying to rescue Geppetto from the belly of the giant whale Monstro.
This final episode is, in particular, a Freudian delight. Deprived of a proper birth and infancy (or rather, like all children, unable to remember them), Pinocchio arranges his own. Setting a fire inside the whale`s cavernous stomach, Pinocchio provokes Monstro to sneeze and expel not just himself but his entire substitute family.
With this second birth, and the lesson of self-sacrifice it entails, Pinocchio finally becomes human. Apparently drowned, Pinocchio is visited on his deathbed by the life-giving Blue Fairy. Suddenly sitting up, he proclaims, ”I`m alive and I`m real!” as if one did not necessarily imply the other. Jean-Paul Sartre could not have put it better.
It has been said that every great work of art is in part about its own making, and the same is true of ”Pinocchio.” Geppetto, the kindly old toymaker who creates clocks and puppets out of lifeless blocks of wood, could easily be Disney himself, creating life out of ink and paint on the animation stand. Geppetto`s madly elaborate clocks and music boxes-so intricately and imaginatively animated-reflect Disney`s own unbridled and thoroughly American love for gadgetry, a love expressed through ”Pinocchio”`s many technical innovations.
One shot, using the ”Multi-Plane” camera pioneered by Disney`s technicians to depict the morning rituals of Geppetto`s village, cost a reported $25,000 for 30 seconds of screen time, a budget higher than some entire B-films of the period.
The basic building block of ”Pinocchio” is the sphere, as opposed to the line and the plane then in use at less financially advantaged studios, such as Warner Brothers. Circles and spheres are everywhere, from the shape of the character`s heads to the dozens of animated raindrops that fall in the film`s storm sequence.
It is this emphasis on volume, on the many-sidedness of things, that gives Disney animation its unique weight and presence. Where the frontal compositions of the Warner Brothers cartoons remained linked to those of the newspaper comic strip, Disney`s camera angles and tracking shots suggested the techniques of the most highly developed live action films.
The triumphant cry, ”I`m alive and I`m real!” is not only the boast of a character but of a creator-Disney`s quite understandable burst of pride over what he has here wrought. The animation of ”Pinocchio” is indeed alive and fully rounded: psychologically, morally, and formally.
