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The eternal return of Pinocchio

2020-09-25T02:26:42.872Z


Coinciding with the premiere of the new adaptation of Collodi's classic, directed by Matteo Garrone, we compare the original and its infinite re-readings, including that of Walt Disney, whose premiere marks 80 years


The other day I was fried with

The Seven Samurai

, in the middle of a scene of a peasant assembly that, before making me lose consciousness, brought me repeated

flashbacks

of 15-M.

When I woke up from my nap, I told my wife that some things seemed meant to be redone.

Pathfinder should not win by default;

Certain works require debugging and modernization (otherwise we would still fly by zeppelin).

The first thing John Sturges did when embarking on the

remake

of

The Seven Samurai

was to load up the tiresome - albeit exquisitely filmed - Kurosawa villagers together.

The new version

, The Magnificent Seven

He went straight to the epic and the shooting, to which had to be added the suggestive bald head of Yul Brynner.

And it lasted an hour less.

With this

I would

never

have fallen asleep, I sentenced my incredulous wife.

Pinocchio

, the fable that the Italian Carlo Collodi published in installments between 1881 and 1883, shares with

The Seven Samurai

his contribution to reinterpretation.

Since the first silent version was released in Italy in 1911, the book has led to dozens of adaptations to celluloid.

It would be tedious to cite them here, but the list includes a 1965 Belgian-American production where Pinocchio goes to space (a genius replaced Jiminy Cricket with an

alien

turtle

), a heinous

1996

family fantasy film

with Martin Landau in the role of Gepetto ( the sequel was direct to video), and a 1941 German film where Pinocchio is a gay SA officer who escapes from the SS during the night of the long knives, and that I just made up.

Pinocchio is now returning to theaters for the solace of all infants.

Pinocchio

(2019), the version directed by Matteo Garrone, starring Roberto Benigni (Gepetto) and a young man with an unpolished dresser face (the homonymous character), advertises his “fidelity” to Collodi's classic as a cardinal ingredient.

Benigni, by the way, had played the wooden doll in

Pinocchio

(2002), an adaptation that is as “faithful” as it is disturbing.

In it

,

the mature actor, dressed as John Wayne Gacy in full telele, showed that sticking to the original was no guarantee of success.

Not of artistic quality.

In any case, nobody knew how to see the proverbial beard of the neighbor soaking.

The consensus continued to affirm that the Tuscan pamphlet was the pattern to follow, and that any version that had deviated from it, such as

Disney's

Pinocchio

(1940) (I will return to it later), would be impure from its gestation.

Guillermo del Toro will premiere yet another

Pinocchio

, on Netflix, when 2021 arrives. It will be

stop motion animation

and, of course, faithful to the book as no one has ever been.

Drawing presented in 2011 by Gris Grimly and Del Toro to show what 'Pinocchio' will be like.

GRIMLY GRAY

In all this, no one seems to have really read the little book, which is disturbing.

Well it could be that a) we were facing a classic that

precisely

cries out for the unfaithful adaptation, b) the Disney version was not the diabetic mess that some consider, and c) as happened with

The Seven Samurai

(or

Moby Dick

), proceed to eliminate a few reams of old-fashioned Italian, for after all they were written in 1881, for other people and another world, and to put the heart of the thing to good use.

It's just an idea.

The Original:

The Adventures of Pinocchio or Story of a Buritan

(1883)


The book was written to entertain, but also, especially, to educate.

It is a pedagogical book in the style of the moralizing fables of our ancestors, where wayward or spoiled children always ended up caged or torn to pieces by wild beasts.

So that they learn.

And if some sadistic reader laughs, all the better.

The story of Pinocchio, recently reissued by Navona, is well known, archetypal, and therefore doubly difficult to read.

As is often the case with great satires -

Farmhouse Rebellion

,

Candido

, etc. - one always has the impression of knowing the joke.

It begins with an old man, Gepetto, who wants a wooden doll.

After punching out a neighbor carpenter (sic), he gets a stump.

Said trunk comes to life when it is carved and becomes a wooden child, although with a dung soul.

Yes, Pinocchio is a hateful character, conceived as a model for Todo Lo Malo: junkie, bad liar (remember the retractable napia), credulous, answering and stupid.

And a repeat offender: like a cocaine

addict

in the middle of

teching

, Pinocchio promises and promises that he will never do it again, but at the slightest mishap he is dialing the number of the dealer.

After a few mischiefs, the insufferable puppet appears The Talking Cricket (not called Pepito here), "patient and philosopher", to offer a couple of moral advice.

But, luckily or unfortunately, Pinocchio crushes him with a hammer blow (suck that one, Disney), without giving him time to sing the first notes of 

When you wish upon a star

.

And we're still on page 36.

Gepetto, the patient elder of Santo Job, takes his self-denial to hysterical extremes: he makes Pinocchio "a little flowery paper suit, a pair of shoes with tree bark and a hat with breadcrumbs" so that he can go to school , he sells his coat to buy his school report card, and a little later he sells his aged butt in a brothel in Shanghai.

No, it does not reach the latter, but the previous one does.

Pinocchio, ungrateful puppet from hell, sells the primer to go to a puppet theater.

What follows looks as much like the Disney movie as

Eduardo Manospenes

(1991) does the Tim Burton original.

The puppeteer Fire Eater incorporates the

burattino

into his traveling theater, but later throws him into the fire, scorching his feet.

Zorra and Gato, the scoundrels he runs into in cartoons, are here absentee students ("Because of the mad passion of studying I have lost a leg"), because for Collodi, skipping algebra was like injecting basuco.

First they rob him, then they plan to murder him.

The Talking Cricket, who was not dead in the end, tries to warn the boy, but he turns a deaf ear.

He narrowly escapes the infanticides and goes to jail with their branches.

When he leaves he gets into new trouble, and all the animals of creation, along with "the girl with blue hair" (the fairy), take turns giving him paternalistic admonitions.

Pinocchio returns to school, but on an outing to the beach he hooks up with his classmates, inspiring

Quadrophenia

.

Then a fisherman mistakes him for a fish and tries to fry him in a pan, a parrot asks him to make amends, a snail chops him, and a tuna I don't remember what he does, but it doesn't matter, because Pinocchio ends up in the Country of Jauja , which on the outside looks like Oktoberfest but on the inside is a Stalinist gulag.

Unlike the 1940 film, Pinocchio ends up there as a full-length donkey.

As a colt that he is, they make him pull the cart.

His new master, seeing that he is an inoperative animal, throws him into the sea to drown and skin him (adapt this if you dare, Walt!).

Luckily (I'm done), the fish eat his burresque skin, and Pinocchio returns to his previous desirable talking-shelf state.

In the end, he rescues Gepetto from the belly of the Shark, and he becomes a child, a good child, and everything is filled with joy in the old man's house, because “when children who were bad become good, they have the virtue of making everything takes on a new and smiling look even within their families ”(uf).

It does not take a light to see what

Pinocchio is about

: listen to your parents, child of the noses, in fact, obey

any

authority figure, police and priests included, study and work from sunrise to sunset, honor your relatives (infallible from birth, like the Holy Father), performs acts of charity, produces consumer goods and everything will be fine.

Italo Calvino, in an act of adventurous exegesis, points out in the prologue that Collodi's book is, to top it all off, full of “Christological” and biblical symbolism, from the joker Baby Jesus of the apocryphal gospels to the story of Jonah and the whale, going through circumcision (when Pinocchio's nose is eaten by birds).

Disney's adaptation:

Pinocchio

(1940)

Walt, old fox that he was, took the best of Collodi's book, and snipped at the superfluities and the exemplary tab.

Children's book author Maurice Sendak wrote in

The

Washington Post

that “the movie's Pinocchio is not the rebellious, moody, vicious, devious (…) puppet that Collodi created.

Nor is he a child of sin, inborn wicked, doomed to calamity.

It is rather adorable, and in that lies the triumph of Disney.

Your Pinocchio is a naughty, innocent and very naive wooden child.

What makes our anxiety about his fate bearable is the reassuring feeling that Pinocchio is loved for himself, and not for what he should or shouldn't be. "

Sendak ended by saying that Disney had "corrected a terrible mistake."

Disney's version of Pinocchio.

It is difficult not to agree.

The Disney version removes the repellency and lecture, leaving the good stuff (the plot and the characters).

Like all Disney productions of the forties and fifties, it is gloomy, expressionistic and suspenseful.

One last thing that Uncle Walt replaced would be the

protagonist's

look

: the sinister anorexic Pierrot from the book mutated into a puppet with a ruddy cheek and improbable Bavarian costume, including

lederhosen

and a Tyrolean hat.

For this I have a final theory: a) Disney was right-wing.

b) Hitler used to wear

lederhosen

.

c)

Pinocchio

was released on February 7, 1940, two weeks after Herman Göring commissioned Reinhard Heydrich to solve the “Jewish question”.

Coincidence?

I do not think so.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2020-09-25

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