“Pinocchio” opens on a wish and spends the next 88 minutes testing whether the wish was worth it. Walt Disney’s second animated feature, released by RKO Radio Pictures on February 23, 1940 after a February 7 premiere at the Center Theatre in New York City, follows a wooden puppet who is brought to life but not yet made human. To become a real boy, he must prove he is “brave, truthful, and unselfish.” That is the whole engine of the film, and it is enough.
The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, with sequences directed by Bill Roberts, Norman Ferguson, Jack Kinney, Wilfred Jackson and T. Hee. It is loosely based on Carlo Collodi’s 1883 novel The Adventures of Pinocchio. The result is the rare family film that treats its own premise as a threat.
Trailer, via Disney.
A Cricket, a Woodcarver, and a Wish
In a sleepy Italian village, Jiminy Cricket arrives at the shop of a woodworker and toymaker named Geppetto, who lives with his cat Figaro and his fish Cleo. Geppetto builds a puppet and names it Pinocchio. As he falls asleep, he wishes upon a star for the puppet to be a real boy.
Late that night the Blue Fairy visits the workshop and brings Pinocchio to life, though he remains a puppet. She tells him that if he proves himself brave, truthful and unselfish, he will become real. When Jiminy reveals himself, she assigns him to be Pinocchio’s conscience. Geppetto wakes at the commotion and is overjoyed.
That sequence is the film’s promise. Everything after it is the bill coming due.
Honest John and the Bird Cage
Walking to school the next morning, Pinocchio is led astray by the con artist fox Honest John and his sidekick Gideon the Cat. Honest John talks him into joining Stromboli’s puppet show over Jiminy’s objections. Pinocchio becomes Stromboli’s star attraction. When he tries to go home, Stromboli locks him in a bird cage and leaves to tour the world with him.
Jiminy fails to free him. The Blue Fairy appears. Anxious, Pinocchio lies about what happened, and his nose grows into a tree branch with a bird’s nest on it. She restores his nose and frees him when he promises to make amends, but warns that she can offer no further help.
That warning lands harder than any villain in the film. The Blue Fairy does not punish Pinocchio. She simply stops protecting him.
Pleasure Island and the Coachman
A mysterious Coachman hires Honest John to find disobedient and naughty boys to take to Pleasure Island. Honest John accepts the job out of fear, despite the legal risks and the Coachman’s implication of what happens to the boys, and finds Pinocchio, persuading him to take a vacation there.
The film never shows the Coachman’s operation in detail, and it does not need to. The implication is the horror. A children’s movie in 1940 built its third act on the idea that a man is buying boys, and it trusted the audience to understand why.
The Voices Behind the Puppet
Disney wanted famous voices after the success of Snow White, and Pinocchio became the first animated film to use celebrities as voice actors. Cliff Edwards, the singer known as “Ukulele Ike,” played Jiminy Cricket. Disney rejected an adult for Pinocchio and cast 12-year-old Dickie Jones, who had appeared in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Frankie Darro played Lampwick. Walter Catlett played Honest John. Evelyn Venable played the Blue Fairy. Charles Judels played both Stromboli and the Coachman. Christian Rub played Geppetto, whose design was a caricature of Rub; Disney had recast the part after deciding the first actor’s voice was “too harsh.”
Mel Blanc, best known for Warner Bros. cartoons including Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, recorded Gideon the Cat over sixteen days. The decision was later made to keep Gideon mute. All of Blanc’s dialogue was deleted except one hiccup, heard three times in the finished film.
| Role | Voice actor | What survived |
|---|---|---|
| Pinocchio | Dickie Jones | Full performance, age 12 |
| Jiminy Cricket | Cliff Edwards | Full performance |
| Geppetto | Christian Rub | Full performance, cast after a recast |
| Gideon the Cat | Mel Blanc | One hiccup, heard three times |
| Stromboli / The Coachman | Charles Judels | Both roles, one actor |
Blanc’s sixteen days of work reduced to a hiccup is the kind of detail that would be a scandal now. Here it reads as a studio still figuring out what animation could do.
Why the Effects Still Hold
Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in effects animation, giving realistic movement to vehicles and machinery and to natural elements including rain, water, lightning, smoke and shadow. That craft is not decoration. It is what makes the danger feel physical.
The film received critical acclaim and became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award, winning two for Best Music, Original Score and Best Music, Original Song. It runs 88 minutes. It is an animation, family and fantasy film, and it carries the tagline “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”
The tagline is a lie the movie tells in order to correct it. Wishing gets Pinocchio a life. It does not get him a self. The Blue Fairy’s help runs out, Jiminy’s guidance fails repeatedly, and the puppet earns nothing he did not suffer for. That is a sterner moral than most films aimed at children attempt today, and Pinocchio never stops to explain it.
The casting is the part worth watching. Putting a real 12-year-old at the center, surrounding him with a popular singer and a Warner Bros. character actor, and then cutting that actor down to a hiccup shows a studio treating voice as performance rather than stunt. Edwards’ Jiminy is the film’s spine for the same reason. He is a conscience who is bad at his job and keeps showing up anyway.
The film’s one soft spot is its pacing in the Pleasure Island stretch, where the Coachman arrives with less setup than the rest of the film’s villains receive. It is a small complaint against a movie that otherwise knows exactly how much to show and how much to withhold.
Pinocchio is not a film about a puppet learning to be good. It is a film about a puppet learning that being good is work, and that the people who love him cannot do it for him. Eighty-six years on, that is still the sharpest thing Disney has ever put on screen.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
