As Hurricane Shirley notes at Boil Some Water this morning, one book that I need for my personal research in writing my next novel is the new translation of Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio (New York Review Books) with an introduction by acclaimed author Umberto Eco.
From John Powers’ NPR essay, Collodi’s Brooding, Subversive Pinocchio, demonstrating that while the terrain may be a bit familiar, it sure as hell is not Disney’s Pinocchio:
Collodi’s book is, from the beginning, a very different — and much wilder — experience. Gepetto isn’t a kindly old man — he’s hot-tempered and grindingly poor. There is a talking cricket, but it’s not named Jiminy, doesn’t wear a top hat, and gets squished by Pinocchio 12 pages in when it tries to give him advice. This lack of sentimentality runs through the book, whose sense of reality reflects the harshness of life in Collodi’s Tuscany. This is a place driven by hunger, brutality, greed and social injustice.
Which isn’t to say that the book is depressing. In fact, it’s filled with wonderful surreal touches, many involving animals, like the huge snail that offers to let Pinocchio into his house then takes nine hours to reach the front door. A similar anarchic spirit infuses Pinocchio himself, who’s not the cute, anodyne figure we remember from the movie. He’s a selfish, unruly, sometimes cruel puppet — the very soul of childhood.
Filed under: Boil Some Water | Tagged: Boil Some Water, Pinocchio, Rodger Jacobs
I remember reading a translation in high school and greatly enjoying the book. If there was one great thing about the classic Disney movies, it’s that they were often a good springboard into seeking out some very good literature that had little in common with the movies, but were so much better. “Jungle Book” ended up prompting me to discover Rudyard Kipling, which lead to a general love of turn of the century British literature.
“The Jungle Book” is my favorite feature-length animated Disney feature but, man, it is 100 miles distant from Kipling’s book, isn’t it? I also recall from my childhood reading that “Snow White” is way darker than the sanitized Disney version — actually I find the whole resurrection of the dead motif in “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow White” terribly disturbing on many levels, an outward manifestation, perhaps, of Walt’s alleged terror of death.
“Jungle Book” is my second favorite – the music is really good, but yes, very far from Kipling’s epic coming of age tale.
Somewhere I have a book of translations of some of the more popular fairy tales and the original “Snow White” is incredibly dark, as is the supposed original “Cinderella”. But then the world was a darker, more cruel place when they were written, and children were expected to grow up much faster (which is one of the reasons I shake my head when parents complaining that children “grow up too fast these days”, but that’s a whole other side rant about how people have no understanding of history.)
There are some interesting things to be found if you deconstruct the classic Disney films with an eye to Walt’s “quirks”. I will say, at least Sleeping Beauty’s mother has the distinction of being the only mother to survive to the end of the movie.
Odd how matricide seemed to be a recurring Disney theme (I’m thinking of “Bambi” right now).