Pinocchio Unhinged

Like many before me, my introduction to Pinocchio was through the 1940 animated Disney adaptation. It was never my favorite as a kid. It was too simple, and too confusing all at once. Outlandish and fantastical, but wrapped up too neatly to linger in my imagination. Rewatching as an adult though, I was met with an unhinged fable that slapped me right in the amygdala.

In this version of the story, an old man makes a puppet and wishes it was real. A fairy says, yeah, screw it, I'm bored, gives the puppet consciousness, and moments after it wakes, she promises to make it a real boy if it's good and brave or whatever.

The old man finds the puppet boy, breezes past any incredulity, and lets him sleep in his bed. In the morning, the wood kid is sent to a school he's never been to by himself. Not that he's ever been anywhere.

The boy gets trafficked and sold to the theater. This is fun for a bit. He is seduced by the approval of the theater owner which he has spent more waking hours with than Geppetto. Applause is nice too! But when he realizes what it means to be trafficked and tries to leave to go see his papa, 24 hours after becoming self aware, he gets locked in a cage.

The (likely omniscient based on later events) fairy that gave him life shows up unprompted, smiles at the caged puppet beatifically, and asks the painfully ignorant little dude what happened. He is so ashamed about being gaslighted by a couple of child traffickers that he lies and makes up some stuff about monsters stuffing him in a sack (which could be the clearest possible metaphor that a child in emotional distress might use for being abducted).

So, the fairy makes his nose grow from the escalating lie until the tip of his schnoz sprouts a nest and two eggs from which hatch birds that fly away. The fairy gives him some moralizing bs about not lying, and oh so magnanimously gives him a second chance and releases him from his cage. The little wooden lad is genuinely thankful.

Pinocchio runs home, but gets trafficked again. Same traffickers, two days in a row. This time he gets sold to a creepy old guy that says something like "they don't come back boys from pleasure island." He gets thrown on a boat and taken to pleasure island. That night, he does roudy boy stuff, and starts to experience the body horror of turning into a jackass, but he runs away from the island before he fully turns.

All the other boys, not so lucky. The donkey boys are sold to the salt mine to labor as beasts of burden. At least that's what the creepy old guy says. They're being crammed into cages as the inhalation of human cries become the exhalation of equine brays, the cages loaded onto a steamboat by amorphous hominids. I'm inclined to believe the creepy old guy.

Anyways, Pinocchio swims/runs home, but Geppetto isn't there. The fairy sends a beautiful white dove with a letter. "Dear puppet I brought to life a couple days ago, your dad went looking for you. He's at the bottom of the ocean inside a whale that ate him. That is all."

Pinocchio finds the whale, gets his dad out with reckless heroics that only someone born the day before yesterday could muster, and gets him to shore safely, but Pinocchio drowns or dies or something in the process. Geppetto brings his cold, dead, soggy little stick boy home and cries over his little body.

Then the fairy's like, ok, I'm bored and maybe a bit ashamed, so she discreetly brings the boy back to life as a real boy without showing her face. The end. All the other boys that turned into jackasses? Not her problem. The end I said.

The boy's parent and creator send him into the world unprepared, and Pinocchio learns some random lessons through sheer neglect. Don't lie. Be brave (although his ignorance means this happens mostly without choice). As for the cricket, his actions mean next to nothing in this story.

A fickle fairy and an unfit father. Pinocchio is on his own.

What a wild, unhinged ride. Anyways, great movie!