This is one of the Disney Animated Features that I own on VHS cassette tape. My husband joked to me when I instructed him to get up and press the button on the machine to start the VCR “What? No remote? How barbaric.” The only time that I felt the cassette recording was a detriment to the viewing experience was the very beginning and ending of the film where there was panning in/out of the town in which Geppetto lived. It seemed really dark and undetailed to me, something that I am sure is not apparent on a DVD.
As I commented in an earlier post, this is one of the only Disney features that I currently recall has a narrator, not to mention the fact that Jiminy Cricket breaks the fourth wall in the first few minutes of the film. I also like the fact that this film opens with an animated book to tell the story and not a real world book. It seemed more natural to me.
One comment from my husband that I happen to agree with is that he recognized right away that the scenes with the Blue Fairy were rotoscoped. He didn’t know that was what the technique was called, but he noticed it right away. I didn’t notice as many uses of the multiplane camera as I am sure there were, but the one place I did see it was when Honest John leads Pinocchio away from school to become an actor.
Speaking of becoming an actor, it bothered me for the first forty minutes or so that Honest John and his cat pal were singing “Hi diddle dee, an actor’s life for me…” and that little tune was familiar as all hell to me until it clicked that I knew it better from Peter Pan as “a pirate’s life for me…” Husband and I also commented on how Honest John and his cat pal were animals in a human world. We were at a loss as to the reason why the story/animation team chose to make them animals instead of human.
It had been a while since I had seen the movie and I admit I had forgotten quite a bit about it. The whole underwater sequence I had no recollection of. None of it was familiar to me in the least.
Now I don’t want to pick on the story too much here, but what on earth caused Geppetto to take everything he owns and hop on a boat to go look for Pinocchio? Seriously? (My guess is that there was a scene that was cut where he finds out that Pinocchio was taken to Pleasure Island and charts a boat to rescue him, but that’s all I’ve got.) Not to mention the fact, who in their right mind sends their less than twelve hour old wooden boy to walk to school by himself on his first day? Damn it, man, you should have taken him to school yourself, meet the teacher for Pete’s sake. You should at least let the cat go with him, you crazy old kook.
There was definitely an improvement in how they handled animating humans since the release of Snow White. The only comment I have was the fact that Cleo had eyelashes and used lipstick (something that is repeated in Fantasia if I recall correctly) and that whale seemed really gruesome to me. I understand that he’s supposed to be (swallowing a ship whole and all that), but if you were showing the two side by side it emphasized that there were different artists and different styles of the art in play. It’s not a complaint (it’s a bit of a backhanded compliment), just a realization that many people had their imprint on the final feature. This is erased as they progress (think the stylization of Sleeping Beauty) so in a way, it’s fascinating to see.
Now it’s a bit of a bummer that I don’t have the newest DVD with the behind scenes commentary or else I may have some more witty insight to some of the decisions that they made in the course of making this film. I’m hoping to get a copy eventually and compare my thoughts to what the documentary might say.
Up next is Fantasia, by far one of my personal favorite films.