GROSS/31 1940 - lies, lies, lies
Look, I'm sorry. This is just several hundred words about how weird Pinocchio is.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
PINOCCHIO, WALT DISNEY, BEN SHARPSTEEN, HAMILTON LUSKE, WALT DISNEY PRODUCTIONS, 1940, 88 MINUTES.
It’s 1940. The world, from the Pacific to the North Atlantic coast is at war. It’s been nasty for years and it’s going to get much worse. Meanwhile, in la-la land, Walt Disney releases his second animated feature (I wrote about the first one a few weeks ago), the biggest film in the year of its release and a big earner for the company ever since. But this film is so odd and so unsettling that it feels almost like it might have been a kind of upside-down mirror to the war across the oceans in which, soon enough, America will be an actor.
The puppet’s origin
You probably already knew that Pinocchio is a profoundly strange film. It’s obviously not a war movie but in some ways it is a horror movie. It’s based on a pretty strange book - an eccentric (unhinged?) fable from the Italian risorgimento. This is the period of civil war and unrest that had led to the reunification of Italy in 1861. The reunification that radicals, animated by a wave of European revolutions, hoped would lead to a modern republic but which actually produced another backward monarchy. And this is the monarchy that would itself ultimately decay into fascism and chaos and be swept away by the war. And that war is the one that has just begun as Disney and his supervising animators Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, are finishing their movie.
The book, written after the wars of independence by disillusioned participant Carlo Collodi, is a spiky, disorienting read. Originally published in an Italian children’s weekly, it’s honestly nightmare-inducing. Pinocchio is barely a puppet, more of a crudely-whittled branch - nothing cute or entertaining about this wannabe boy. In the illustrations he’s all angles. In chapter four he throws a hammer at a talking cricket and, well, that’s that for his conscience.
The book is chaotic, events seem arbitrary, characters arrive and then disappear without explanation. Apparently Collodi would throw off chapters in a hurry to meet his weekly deadline and wasn’t particularly fussy about continuity between them. Of course, much of this period’s children’s literature seems dark and kind of inappropriate to us now - tell me you could find a publisher for Alice in Wonderland in 2024 - so Pinocchio is no outlier. It is a surprising choice for a mid-twentieth century family entertainment, though.
Horror upon horror
Early in the book the wooden boy puts his feet too close to the fire and they’re burnt to ashes, leaving him footless. Terrified children are abducted, sorted for their usefulness as labourers and turned into donkeys to work in the mines or the fields (this scene recurs in the film and it’s only slightly less scary). Pinocchio survives this episode by the grace of his protector the blue fairy but the manner of his escape is so gruesome I don’t really want to type it out here. The episode with the whale - an elderly shark in the book - is bizarre and kind of unpleasant. I could give you half a dozen of these grim vignettes. It’s brutal.
But Walt Disney in this period seems to have been wired pretty directly into a dark, middle-European sensibility. Trackless forests, murderous villains, hidden realms. Disney’s landscape in these fairytale features isn’t a million miles from Tolkien’s broadly Nordic Middle-Earth, but if anything it’s darker and more chilling, perhaps because the world beyond the story is so vague and out-of-focus, falling away to darkness in every direction (and there are no helpful maps here). Perhaps because it’s closer to the uncomfortable reality of the old Europe in which the fairytales originate: feudal barons, plague, perpetual war. This is the Erlking’s forest. Get used to it.
Enter weird Walt
Pinocchio is lit like a German expressionist art film. Every location is gloomy, uninviting, candlelit. Robin Allan says, in his book about the European influences on Disney, that seventy-six of the film’s eighty-eight minutes take place at night or under water. Shadows, confined spaces, cages, crepuscular environments. There’s nothing sunny about this pastoral vision, this forested landscape is not a refuge or an idyll but a place of dread that’ll send a shiver down your spine if you think about it for a minute.
Even Disney’s highly sanitised update to the little wooden boy’s story is a frankly uncomfortable sequence of events - Pinocchio smiles his way through it idiotically but the adults around him on his adventure are universally wicked or venal or worse (and the children are just stupid). Even the blue fairy, Pinocchio’s guardian angel, seems malicious in the way she permits this stuff to happen to him. She’s a laissez-fairy. And I’m sorry, the nose growing gimmick is unsupportable Freudian-animist bullshit, presumably invented during an opium comedown or something. Come on, guys. We know what you’re doing here.
Management masterclass
Disney brought production on Pinocchio to a total halt after six months of work because the hero his artists had come up with was too close to Collodi’s - a naughty twig, not sufficiently human, impossible to love. An emergency rewrite saw Pinocchio re-imagined as a more compliant boy, the kind of kid you could cuddle. Incidentally, in this readiness to drop everything and start from scratch we see Disney’s famous, instinctive leadership acumen - most bosses would have seen the investment made so far in this very expensive production as a sunk cost and just ploughed on. Not Walt.
But is this a special film, is it beautiful? Should we treasure it as an oddball jewel in the flow of otherwise undifferentiated romances and Westerns from this period? Or is it just weird, even perverse? Is it some kind of depressive cross-contamination from Europe’s spiralling, doomed culture? Should we take at face value the movie’s uninspiring anti-lying message or should we read it as a more ambiguous statement about transgression, criminality, the status of the outsider?
Walt Disney carried on making these strange, psychologically and aesthetically difficult movies until his wartime government work and then the theme parks distracted him. Dumbo, Bambi and Fantasia can hardly be considered uncomplicated or conventional.
In fact, the whole of the man’s oeuvre seems to be a case of mass misrecognition. We have collectively convinced ourselves that his studio’s output is a universally happy, cute, inspiring, innocent and somewhat conservative body of children’s entertainment and we overlook the bizarre and difficult aspects. And Pinocchio really isn’t even the apex of Disney’s weirdness. How did this strange man and his oddball studio become one of the biggest cultural properties on earth? No idea.
Appendix: Italians and hats
Here’s a ridiculous hypothesis. I’ve left it out of the post because I don’t want you to think I’m an idiot. Although it might be too late for that. It’s got to do with hats.
In this film, the peasant folk from which Pinocchio springs have a quite non-specific origin but if I was going to guess I’d say they were approximataly Tyrolean. There are embroidered outfits that look a bit Austrian and - the absolute giveaway - Pinocchio wears a little felt hat with a feather in the hatband. Characters in this movie are pretty heterodox. Geppetto, although his name comes straight from the book, doesn’t seem to be Italian. His accent puts him further North, in Austria perhaps. Honest John the wicked fox is a Rex Harrison-style gent, Stromboli the impresario is a travelling gypsy showman, other characters are harder to locate. Jiminy is a generic chirpy chap; Lampwick, Pinocchio’s unruly schoolmate, is just an American kid (a red-haired, Irish-American kid, to be clear. But that’s another story).
Disney’s being vague here because he’s reluctant to unambiguously locate the story in Italy, its actual place of origin. The problem is that Italians in this period are not the cool, fast-talking, amoral capitalist archetypes they would become in pop culture later in the century. On the contrary, they stand for indigence, petty criminality and primitive peasant ways. They gather together in the poor parts of the big cities and publicly pursue their primitive religious rituals. There’s an anti-Catholic strand here, too, of course (and a general fear of communism and imported proletarian organisation). Sometimes it was affectionate, though. Leonard Marx, the oldest of the Marx Brothers, was called Chico because, as a young man, he liked to chase the chicks but his on-stage personality from the beginning was that of a cheeky Italian conman, the kind of chancer the brothers would have encountered in their neighbourhood on the East side of Manhattan.
Decades of prejudice and anti-Italian agitation, beginning during the mass immigration of poor Italians in the 1890s culminated in legislation introduced in the 1920s. The 1924 Immigration Act sharply limited Italian immigration, as well as prohibiting immigration from Asia all together and imposing quotas on the rest of Southern and Eastern Europe (Jews were another target for the law and the quotas explain why they found no refuge from the holocaust in the United States).
So even as late as Pinocchio Italian immigrants were identified with crime, poverty and antisocial behaviour. Stereotypes about Sicillian gangsters and illiterate peasants with dozens of kids were the norm. Obviously, an Italian cartoon hero would have been unthinkable. It’s possible to read the feathered cap as Hollywood’s standard indicator of being a peasant but not being an Italian peasant.
Pinocchio is, of course, on Disney+, alongside the whole catalogue, back to Snow White. There’s a Blu-Ray.
If you don’t know much about the Erlking, generic Euro-ogre and definitely the most terrifying monster in all of folklore, you should start with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing Schubert’s Erlkönig, which will put the fear of God in you. Then you might want to read Angela Carter’s equally chilling story The Erl-King, which is in her famous collection The Bloody Chamber (“Erl-King will do you grievous harm”) and then Michel Tourneur’s The Erl-King, a beautiful and very dark novel that links the ancient stories with the holocaust, which will make you move to a monastery or something.
A complicating factor for my hat theorem is that Chico Marx, a nominally Italian character, wore a Tyrolean hat by Borsalino. See also Frankenstein and its sequel, covered here a few issues back, in which the pitchfork-wielding peasantry wears the feather caps and the gentry wears nice flannel suits and evening gowns.
I want to find a correspondence between Pinocchio and last week’s film Gone With the Wind. I think it’s possible. I mean Collodi’s book was written in the period of nationalist fervour, revolution and war across all of continental Europe that produced the pattern of nations that we know today and Gone with the Wind is set in the parallel moment of national crisis that produced today’s United States of America. And there’s also the fact that Gone With the Wind’s hero, pragmatic Promethean capitalist Rhett Butler, makes his money from blockade-busting trade with the emerging European nations and, in particular, with the OG revolutionary creation, France. Job done, I think you’ll find.
It may be that it’s not possible to make a movie from Collodi’s story that isn’t weird. As far as I can tell all the other efforts have been pretty odd too, although there are a lot of them and I’ve hardly seen any of them. The Guillermo Del Toro version definitely is. And Spielberg’s sci-fi re-imagining couldn’t have been otherwise (I’d like to be able to tell you how Puff the Magic Dragon and the Land of the Living Lies fits into all this but I’m afraid I can’t).
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and here’s another top-grossing list.