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Pinocchio 1940 film - History

Pinocchio 1940 film - History: Encyclopedia II - Pinocchio 1940 film - History

Pinocchio 1940 film - Production. The plan for the original film was considerably different from what was released. Numerous characters and plot points, many of which came from the original novel, were used in early drafts. But Walt Disney was displeased with the work that was being done and called a halt to the project midway into production so that the concept could be rethought and the characters redesigned. Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a wise guy, equally rambunctious and sarcastic, just ...

Pinocchio 1940 film: Encyclopedia II - Pinocchio 1940 film - History

Pinocchio 1940 film - History

Pinocchio 1940 film - Production

The plan for the original film was considerably different from what was released. Numerous characters and plot points, many of which came from the original novel, were used in early drafts. But Walt Disney was displeased with the work that was being done and called a halt to the project midway into production so that the concept could be rethought and the characters redesigned.

Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a wise guy, equally rambunctious and sarcastic, just like in the original novel. He looked exactly like a real wooden puppet with, among other things, a long pointed nose, a peaked cap, and bare wooden hands. But Walt found that no one could really sympathize with such a character and so the designers had to redesign the puppet as much as possible. Eventually, they revised the puppet to make him look more like a real boy, with, among other things, a button nose, a child's Tyrolean hat, and regular, four-fingered hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. The only parts of him that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms and legs.

Additionally, it was at this stage that the character of the cricket was expanded. Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards) became central to the story. Originally, he was depicted as a really-for-real cricket with toothed legs and waving anntenae. But again Walt wanted someone more likable, so Ward Kimball conjured up "a little man with no ears. That was the only thing about him that was like an insect."

Mel Blanc (who also did the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and dozens of other Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies characters at Warner Bros.), was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat, who is Foulfellow the Fox's sidekick. However, it was decided for Gideon to be mute (just like Dopey, whose whimsical, Harpo Marx-style persona made him one of Snow White's most comic and popular characters) and all of Blanc's recorded dialogue in this film had been deleted, save for one military hiccup, which was heard a couple of times in the film.

According to Leonard Maltin's book, The Disney Films, "With Pinocchio, Disney reached not only the height of his powers, but the apex of what many of his (later) critics considered to be the realm of the animated cartoon."

Pinocchio 1940 film - Release: Reactions and criticisms

Pinocchio was not commercially successful when first released, and Disney only recouped about half of its $2.3 million budget, which was due in part to poor timing, with the cut-off of European markets, thanks to World War II. By the time the film was released, the mood of Americans had also darkened, also due to the war. People just weren't as into seeing fairy tales then as they were in the days of Snow White.

However, there were other reasons why Pinocchio didn't quite pan out on initial release, too. One thing that Snow White had that Pinocchio didn't was romance. There wasn’t much in the way of "falling-in-love-at-first-sight" in Pinocchio as there had been in Snow White, which apparently was what people had come to expect of in Disney. To add insult to injury, Paolo Lorenzini, nephew of the original story's author, had beseeched the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture to charge Walt for slander in portraying Pinocchio "so he easily could be mistaken for an American," when it was perfectly obvious that the little puppet was in fact Italian. Fortunately, nothing had apparently come of the protest.

Nevertheless, there were positive reactions to the movie, as well. Archer Winsten, who had criticized Snow White, wrote: "The faults that were in Snow White no longer exist. In writing of Pinocchio, you are limited only by your own power of expressing enthusiasm." Also, despite the poor timing of the release, the film did do well both critically and at the box office in the United States. Finally, Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as a fanfare for Walt Disney Studios itself. Pinocchio also won the Academy Award for Best Song and the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. The film has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and in 1994 was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2005 Time.com named it one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years. Overall, Pinocchio is considered a true-blue classic today, and many people hail this film as one of the most beautifully animated ever.

Pinocchio 1940 film - Re-release schedule and home video

With the re-release of Snow White in 1944 came the tradition of re-releasing Disney films every seven to ten years. Pinocchio has been theatrically re-released in 1945, 1954, 1962, 1971, 1978, 1984, and 1992. The 1992 reissue was digitally restored by cleaning and removing scratches from the original negatives one frame at a time, eliminating age-old soundtrack distortions, and revitalizing the color. The film also recieved three video releases in 1985, 1993, (both of those releases were released as Walt Disney Classics videos) and 1999 as a 60th Anniversary edition. It also had a Disney DVD "Limited Issue" release that year before it was added to the Gold Classic Collection in 2000. It was also released on a special edition DVD overseas in 2003.