Pinocchio (1940)

d. Hamilton Luske and Ben Sharpsteen / USA / 88 mins.


Many argue Pinocchio is as close as Walt Disney came to technical perfection, and, although it is not my favorite film of his, I find it difficult to disagree. Of all the animated features he produced, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938 to The Jungle Book in 1967, the art of Pinocchio feels the most alive. Its location in the canon — as Disney's second animated narrative feature, released the same year as his first avant-garde film, Fantasia — seems to contribute to this sense. The excitement of feature animation hadn't yet become standardized, and the exuberance of his animation crew (which had honed its skills on Disney's Silly Symphonies and ultimately Snow White) is still radiates. Now remastered in preparation for its seventieth anniversary, it looks crisp and new. The artwork pops from its careful detail, and patented multi-plane camera produces its best work here, creating an illusion of depth that is almost as convincing as it is visually stunning.

They still make films this beautiful, but rarely do they animated films this frightening. Its parable is as subtle as its carnivorous whale: "good" boys get respect and love and become something, "bad" boys are cast out, isolated, punished, abused, and transformed into donkeys. Pinocchio (voiced by Dickie Jones) is a marionette made by the kindly and lonely old Gepetto (voiced by Christian Rub), who longs for the wooden boy to be flesh and blood, someone to love and someone who will love in return. Then, as these things are wont to happen in the world of animation, the Blue Fairy visits and anthropomorphizes the toy, giving him the chance at experiencing life and the opportunity to become a real boy. As a guide he has Jiminy Cricket (voiced by the magnificent Cliff Edwards), his insectoid and de facto conscience. But Pinocchio soon finds himself in the hands of villains.

Naturally in this realm we're stretching the limits of credulity and lacks almost any semblance of realism. So how does Pinocchio manage to still be disturbing? I think the answer lies in the boy's anxiety-inducing innocence. Even when he is lured by a walking-talking fox named Honest John and put into the hands of a Russian sideshow tyrant, he's all smiles. Pinocchio's famous number "I've Got No Strings" — performed on the sideshow where he dances with other puppets — is done with a smile. Sure, he's confused a little bit and very curious, but the film wisely (and nervously, for me) never imbues its character with any adult characteristics; the mission is to become a real boy. Pinocchio only realizes how much danger he is on until he is locked in a cage hanging from the ceiling. It helps too that Jones, the voice of Pinocchio, was only thirteen at the time, his light and cheery falsetto layered gently in the background of otherwise bizarre and suggestive imagery, which, let's not forget, is unsettling on its own. The bad children on Pleasure Island, who smoke and drink and gamble, are transformed into donkeys, stripped of their ability to speak and are eventually put to work on the salt mines. Even as an adult, it can give a chill.

When Pinocchio won Best Score and Best Original Song at the 1941 Academy Awards, it was the first animated film to win in a competitive category. It has truly wonderful songs — there isn't a dud in the bunch — and no doubt that comes from the fact that the film is economical with its music. Although it's 90 minutes long, there are only five songs in Pinocchio (and two reprises). All of them are catchy and appropriate to the film, and Disney front-loads them — we make our way through all five songs before plot of Pinocchio-gone-missing actually begins. They're all well known today: the lovely "When You Wish Upon a Star," frequently covered but never as tender as when Edwards sang it; Gepetto's "Little Wooden Head," Jiminy's "Give a Little Whistle," the aforementioned "I've Got No Strings," and Honest John's snappy "Hi Diddle Lee Dee (An Actor's Life For Me)."

Ironically, for all its stranger and unexpectedly twisted elements, Pinocchio is still often dismissed for sentimentalizing the sketches of Italian writer Carlo Collodi, whose fairy tales of a boy marionette became collected as the book The Adventures of Pinocchio. It's undeniable that the film has heaping spoonfuls of sugar in traditional Disney fashion, but the effect is remarkably balanced. One of Disney's purest talents (in addition to his visionary genius and knack for selecting engaging stories) is a striking sense of pace. If you'd asked me years ago what I thought of Pinocchio (or Snow White or many of the other golden age films), I'd have told you it was boring. Half-hour television might be to blame for why I remember these slim animated features as overly long, but when you enter adulthood, it's nearly impossible not to feel how fast the story gets underway. I've been watching animated films literally since I was an infant, but I was well into my teen years before I truly began to appreciate them. Re-watching Pinocchio, boring was the furthest thought from my mind. The film is slim, yes; stunning yes; terrifying, yes; but hardly boring.

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)

d. David Hand / USA / 84 mins.


There are some films that are simply better when you know the whole story behind them. Citizen Kane is more thrilling when you realize RKO basically gave Orson Welles the keys to the studio. Singin' in the Rain is more magical when you learn all but a few of the songs existed before the film and MGM just wanted a musical, any musical, constructed around them. Casablanca is more endearing when you hear that everyone on the set thought it was going to be just another war-time film.

Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – the first feature-length animated movie – is among those films that becomes more remarkable when you discover its story: that 750 animators worked on it for three years; that other studios nicknamed it "Disney's Folly" before it hit theaters; that critics thought 84 minutes would be too long for an animated picture and that Technicolor, an investment which had required Disney to mortgage his house, would hurt people's eyes over such a sustained amount of time. The two people most quoted in regard to the film are Disney's wife Lillian and Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein. Lillian Disney famously said, "No one's ever gonna pay a dime to see a dwarf picture." Eisenstein famously proclaimed it the "greatest movie ever made."

Today we know one of these is at least false; for two years Snow White reigned as the highest grossing film of all time, until the release of Gone with the Wind. To the matter of Eisenstein, well, he's certainly entitled to his opinion (circa 1937, of course), but a few movies have been released since then. Snow White is much more than a mere historical footnote, though. There are some films that are great because their content and construction make them so, and there are some films that are great because they were the first of their kind. Snow White, happily, is both.

As with most animated movies, you may have seen it as a child but you haven't really seen it until you're an adult. Snow White is not all singing and smiles; there are moments of darkness and horror, stupendous examples of the broad range of art that Disney's team was capable of producing. The film might become boring if it were all whistling birds and bumbling dwarves, but it is interspersed with a wicked underworld where trees reach out (no doubt an influence on The Wizard of Oz) and vultures follow the evil queen. Why did I not remember the Queen's cold-blooded look when she tells one of her guards to take Snow White into the woods, murder the girl, and bring back her heart in a small box? Probably because the studio would love you to remember only the happiness, the sing-songy parts, which is a shame because the studio sells short Disney's complex and multifaceted vision that produced a film for all audience members.

If the film seems simple today, it's because of a cynical retro-assessment. I wouldn't call it simple as much as I would call it familiar. Many of the archetypes of animation's were born within these frames – from heroine's innocence and the exaggerated dwarf personalities to the catchy songs that advanced the plot rather than distract. Not to mention the poisoned apple, the magic mirror, the valiant prince, and the evil stepmother, who is perhaps the most dynamic character in the entire film. (She looks more dynamic, too: more defined facial features, livelier eyes, careful movements, a visually engaging wardrobe. However, her unmitigated evil and persecution of Snow White ushered in another one of Disney's tropes, much more negative than others: the weak flower of a girl who needs saving.)

It's important to remember that genius breeds imitation, which in turn breeds familiarity. From the technical innovations to the character development and even the basic story structure, Snow White has been the spring from which all other animated films have flown. There are better animated films in my opinion – Beauty and the Beast, most of the Pixar movies, and maybe even Fantasia, Disney's journey into the avant-garde. They have all benefited from a pitch-perfect example. It's enough to make one admit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is still among the fairest of them all.

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Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies (1929-1939)

d. Ub Iwerks, Burton Gillett, Wilfred Jackson, David Hand / USA / Ten selected shorts, 84 mins.


Walt Disney could have gone the easy way. Mickey Mouse was a wildly successful character, and he could stuck with the profit-yielding formula. But he was a visionary who rarely satisfied (as clichéd as it sounds, it's still true). As his studio made Mickey Mouse cartoons, Disney also turned his attention to a new series – dubbed "Silly Symphonies." They were glorious experiments, short animated trial balloons if you will, each building upon the foundation laid by the previous. The ten-year run of Silly Symphonies pushed the skill of his animators, the imagination of his writers, the possibilities of the technology, and the judgment of the audience to new realms, all toward Disney's ultimate goal: a full-length animated movie (realized in 1937 with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

All together, there were 75 short films made under the banner Silly Symphonies – not all of them great. Seven won Academy Awards for Short Animated Film, including the first award ever given in the category. The studio dominated the category for six consecutive years. The best of the series are the groundbreaking ones and the surprising ones, whose influence continues to be felt all the way through to today's television cartoons – shorts like Ub Iwerks's The Skeleton Dance, the brilliant antics of The Tortoise and the Hare, the technological wonder of Flowers and Trees, and beautifully crafted art of The Old Mill.

Considering its grim sense of humor and delightfully dark subject matter, The Skeleton Dance (1929) might seem today a genuinely odd choice for the first of these Disney's shorts. After all, we have come to associate the Disney brand with wholesome and bubbly entertainment, yet lest we forget the disturbing elements of Disney's first films – the forest in Snow White, the underworld of Fantasia, the imprisonment of Dumbo's mother. The subject matter was a perfect fit for Iwerks's distinctive style of animation in the early Disney shorts. His thick and smooth lines, generous use of black ink, and comically bulbous character bodies are today as instantaneously recognizable as Monet's water lilies, Van Gogh's post-impressionist swirls, or Hopper's isolated people. Iwerks was a tremendously efficient animator, rumored to have drawn Disney's Steamboat Willie by himself in only two weeks (or 600 to 700 drawings per day).

The Three Little Pigs (1933) proved to be the most popular of the shorts, with theaters running it alone several times per day. Adapted from the tale of the same name, the short hit the screen at the right time in American culture: the Great Depression was under way, World War II was coming to a boil in Europe, and audiences were looking for relief. "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" was the song two of the pigs sing as they build their shaky homes, and it became an accidental anthem in the days following Franklin Roosevelt's proclamation that "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." The short is notable, too, for bringing to life the ignorant stereotypes pervasive in Hollywood at the time: in the initial version of the short, the Big Bad Wolf appears the brick house dressed as a Jewish peddler. (Today the image has been excised from available copies, dressing the wolf instead as a Fuller Brush salesman.) The same cultural ignorance can be found in many other Silly Symphonies, including the stereotypical depiction of a black woman in Three Orphan Kittens (1935). Kittens seems to be the most superficial upon first glance, but it is one of the best in terms of developing the techniques of great animation: a powerful blizzard allowed the animators to practice drawing the weather; crystal clear reflections of the kittens on a shiny kitchen floor; and attempts at creating movable depictions of three-dimensional objects (instead of remaining static, a couch "twists" as real object would when a kitten runs past).

As the series continued, the animators grew in talent and skill. Flowers and Trees (1932) was the first film ever produced in three-strip Technicolor, an enormous visual leap in terms of developing color films. Disney gambled shrewdly on Technicolor and its inventor, and succeeded wildly. He signed an agreement with the inventor that allowed he and he alone to produce exclusively the only Technicolor shorts for the first three years. Today the film looks commonplace (we're so used to color), but its tender story – of two trees in love, fighting back an evil tree wishing to set the forest on fire – is still charming and entertaining. The Goddess of Spring (1934) was Disney's first attempt at actual human characters. Adapted from the Greek myth of Persephone, the beautiful girl travels with Hades on a disturbing and imaginative journey into the underworld.

Like The Three Little Pigs and The Goddess of Spring, some of the more successful shorts incorporated old fables and set the standard for animated adaptations. Aesop would be paid homage to in The Grasshopper and the Ants (1934), where a carefree grasshopper fiddles his way through happiness while proclaiming the "world owes me a livin'." (The grasshopper's voice is by the same man who would forever be remembered as the voice of Goofy.) The Tortoise and the Hare (1935) and its sequel, Toby Tortoise Returns (1936), reproduce Aesop's tale more effectively, with the famed race in the former and a witty boxing match in the latter.

In addition to their stories, both films were significant technological advancements, too. In supplemental features to the DVD release of the Silly Symphonies, Leonard Maltin notes The Grasshopper and the Ants used color as an actual component to tell a story, and The Tortoise and the Hare marked Disney's first attempts at depicting animated speed and giving its characters postures and actions that define their personalities. (Tex Avery admitted Max Hare from the latter film greatly influenced the development of Bugs Bunny.) Opposite the long line of adaptations, Music Land (1935) is one of the best original stories told. Riffing on Romeo and Juliet and the disapproval of jazz by stodgy old people in the 1930s, the short depicts a battle raging between two kingdoms – classical music and jazz music – when a violin and a saxophone fall in love.

From a technical standpoint, The Old Mill (1937) might be the most impressive of the Silly Symphonies. Its story is nearly nonexistent, taking a backseat to its atmosphere. Animals inhabit an abandoned mill standing serenely in the middle of a field and next to a pond, but when a harsh storm blows in, we watch how the animals take cover and protect themselves. The real star of the short is the multiplane camera, utilized and perfected here for the first time by Disney. (The multiplane camera gives a flat piece of animation unmistakable depth by moving several layers of art simultaneously.)

Disney's studio made a few more Silly Symphonies after The Old Mill, but the series was capped in 1939, ten years and seven Oscars after its debut. By that point Disney and his animators had learned the tools necessary to begin producing full-length animated features. They're prized for their experimentation, yes, but let's not forget how joyfully entertaining they also are.

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