He cannot carry his father’s grief.Īs the fascist setting indicates, del Toro clearly sides with Fellini’s interpretation of individuality versus conformity. The most insightful lesson here is actually taught to Geppetto, who must realize that Pinocchio isn’t Carlo, that Pinocchio is, in fact, only himself. In del Toro’s vision, it means becoming who you are, regardless of the unfair expectations bestowed on you. In Collodi’s novel, becoming a real boy means becoming a good citizen, and in Disney’s cartoon it means growing up. Pinocchio isn’t failing to live up to an abstract directive he is failing to be Carlo. The behavior Geppetto attempts to instill into Pinocchio is no longer some empty moral but rather an impossible ideal, like Vertigo for bereaved parents. Geppetto has lost a young son, Carlo, during the first World War, rendering Pinocchio a stand-in for his dead child-the wood Geppetto uses to build his puppet comes from a tree grown near Carlo’s grave. The setting is now pre-WWII Italy as Mussolini rises to power. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (premiering December 9th on Netflix) adds new flourishes too. Disney, by going all in on the lying trope, shifted the moral from a general “do as you’re told” lesson into what Roger Ebert called an “unforgettable parable about the dangers of telling a lie.” For instance, Pinocchio’s most famous attribute-that his nose grows when he lies-isn’t exactly the whole truth: in the text, when Geppetto finishes making Pinocchio, the puppet’s nose extends uncontrollably without him saying anything at all, leading some scholars to argue that it is anxiety, not fabrication, that causes the growth. What’s less surprising is that each of these filmmakers amended Collodi’s tale to suit their thematic intentions. Surprising, then, that pioneering and iconoclastic figures like Walt Disney and Fellini-and now Guillermo del Toro-found such inspiration in a novel that argues for conformity. Does the cricket believe that “boys who revolt against their parents” deserve the woe that befalls them? Or is the woe merely an unavoidable consequence? The patronizing tone of the text makes the former much likelier. There are no questions about the validity of the status quo the way things are is treated as intrinsically no different from the way things should be. The behavior Geppetto attempts to instill into Pinocchio is no longer some empty moral but rather an impossible ideal.Ĭollodi’s moralizing is stridently conventional: obey your elders, go to school, get a job, don’t be lazy, et cetera. Pinocchio, apparently unmoved by Geppetto’s arrest, runs around freely and soon returns to his maker’s house, where he meets a talking cricket who introduces himself as… “the talking cricket.” Geppetto’s first encounter with his living puppet leads to a public chase in the streets and Geppetto going to jail (ostensibly because he picks Pinocchio up and threatens him, but no one seems that shocked by the talking marionette or wonders if he even feels pain). Which is not to say that Fellini didn’t have his quibbles with the text: “The end of the book is the poorest part,” he told Charlotte Chandler in one of the interviews that make up I, Fellini, “because Carlo Collodi, as a 19th-century man, moralizes when the puppet becomes a boy.” Instead of a happy ending, Fellini saw it as tragic, “because, losing his marionettehood, Pinocchio loses his childhood, the marvelous life of knowing animals and magic, in return for becoming a good, conforming idiot.”įellini is correct about Collodi’s moralizing-although it occurs throughout and not just in its conclusion. Characteristically nonconformist as a kid, Fellini disliked books, which he associated with adults and school, and “school did not seem to be something that opened up the world,” he said in I, Fellini, “but something that closed it, something that interfered with my freedom and imprisoned me for the longest and best part of the day.” Collodi’s fable-about an obstinate youth who defies authority at every turn-makes sense as a narrative that had “an enormous influence” on the great Italian filmmaker. Of the numerous films Federico Fellini was unable to make in his lifetime, his version of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio is perhaps the one he most lamented.
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