The Truly Terrifying Tale of Pinocchio (#169)

I wanted to cover another dark fairytale today! Seasonally, we’re in this strange limbo between Halloween and Christmas, so what could be a more timely combination than taking another magical fairy tale and learning about its weirder, much darker origins?

The Adventures of Pinocchio, is a classic children’s novel written by Carlo Collodi that first appeared in serial form in 1881 in the Giornale dei bambini (“Children’s Magazine”) and was published as a book in 1883. It tells the story of the little marionette who wants to be a real boy, and it is perhaps best known as the basis for the 1940 Disney film, which is one I actually quite enjoyed, despite not loving a lot of Disney’s really early films.

In the Disney film, Jiminy Cricket narrates the story of a woodcarver Geppetto and his pets Figaro the cat and Cleo the fish. Geppetto has just made a little wooden puppet named Pinocchio, whom he loves dearly, and wishes upon a star that Pinocchio would become a real boy. As Geppetto sleeps, the Blue Fairy arrives and grants the wish, but only partially; Pinocchio has come to life, but he is still a puppet and must prove himself worthy before becoming a real boy. However, being naive, he requires some guidance, and the Blue Fairy appoints Jiminy Cricket to be his "conscience".

Pinocchio goes on a series of quite dangerous adventures, and learns along the way that when he lies, his nose grows longer. He manages to return home, but finds a note from the Blue Fairy explaining that Geppetto has gone to sea to search for his lost son and has been swallowed by a whale. Pinocchio and Jiminy journey to the bottom of the sea, where they find Geppetto in the belly of the whale, and escape by setting a fire in the whale’s belly, who sneezes them out. Pinocchio saves Geppetto from drowning but at the cost of his own life. Geppetto's wish is finally granted: Pinocchio's sacrifice has proved to the Blue Fairy that he is worthy, and he is brought back to life not as a puppet but as a real live boy.

To be fair, even the Disney film is dark, and is commonly agreed as being one of the scariest Disney films. But, in true Dark Disney style, the original story is even darker.

The original story by Carlo Collodi opens with a man called Mastro Cherry chopping a log that bizarrely starts giggling. Creeped out by it, Cherry gives it to his lonely friend Geppetto who's been looking to make a marionette to make a living as a puppeteer. While carving him, the marionette calls Geppetto "cornmeal mush" because of his yellow hair, which causes the Geppetto and Mastro Cherry to get into a fight, I assume because Geppetto thought Cherry said it, rather than assuming the piece of wood he was carving could talk.

Geppetto decides to call his marionette Pinocchio, and as soon as he finishes carving his feet, the marionette fully takes on his new persona, kicks his creator in the face, and runs away. Geppetto tries to seize him, but when the police catch up to them, they accuse Geppetto of assaulting the boy and carts him off to prison in front of onlooking villagers.

Pinocchio returns to Geppetto’s empty house, where he takes up residence and dries his feet by the fire after a neighbour dumps a bucket of water on him. He wakes up to find his feet have been burned off. When Geppetto is released from prison and builds Pinocchio a new pair of feet, he sells his only coat so his new 'son' can have a book to go to school with. Pinocchio repays this favour by selling the book so that he can visit a marionette show.

He soon gets into all kinds of violent scrapes. He narrowly escapes being thrown into a fire as fuel for cooking a hungry puppeteer’s dinner. A fisherman coats him in flour and tries to fry him. As punishment for refusing to study, he memorably transforms into a donkey and is thrown into the sea. He falls in with a variety of bad characters, particularly the Fox and the Cat, who scheme to steal his money. Eventually, the Fox and the Cat, disguised as Assassins, hang Pinocchio from a tree in order to get the gold pieces.

But of all the characters he comes across, perhaps the ones that get the shortest end of the stick are ones who are well-loved from the film: the Blue Fairy (despite her animation in the Disney film being absolutely terrifying in my opinion), and Jiminy Cricket.

At one point, when Pinocchio returns home, he is reprimanded by a character called the Talking Cricket. In the Disney film, Jiminy becomes Pinocchio’s conscience and voice of reason, and his companion on his adventures. But in the original, instead of heeding the cricket’s advice, the violent Pinocchio kills the Talking Cricket by mushing him against the wall with a hammer, and the Talking Cricket is no more.

As for the Blue Fairy, she arrives after the Fox and Cat have hanged Pinocchio from a tree and he's declared "dead". In the story she’s referred to as the Fairy with Azure Hair, and she saves Pinocchio at the last moment. When he lies to the Fairy about the gold pieces, his nose grows comically long.

Eventually, Pinocchio finds the Fairy again and comes to live with her as her son. Twice he begins attending school, and twice he allows himself to be led astray. On these adventures, death seems to follow him around everywhere: he meets a snake that dies from a burst artery for mocking his misfortune, and he's also haunted by the ghost of the Talking Cricket. When Pinocchio is at one point turned into a donkey, he changes back—but only after a fisherman tries to drown him, and fish eat the skin off his donkey carcass to reveal his puppet form.

Instead of being swallowed by a whale in the Disney film, Pinocchio is swallowed by a shark and finds Geppetto living in the shark’s belly. They only manage to escape because it has heart troubles and asthma, so sleeps with its mouth open. Pinocchio rescues his father and takes care of him. Then, in an ending similar to the film adaptation, the Fairy turns Pinocchio into a real boy.

Collodi’s original serial was meant to serve as a warning against bad behaviour, and it ended with Pinocchio’s fatal hanging. The disappointment of the story’s fans, however, led Collodi’s publishers to insist that he resurrect Pinocchio and continue the puppet’s adventures.

Like many Tuscan folk tales, Pinocchio has important moral lessons for children, for example: disobedience doesn’t pay, telling lies isn’t wise, and boys who love and take care of their parents will be rewarded. Even with its harsh lessons, the story remains a timeless classic. It was translated into numerous languages, with an English-language version first appearing in 1892, and it was released under a number of titles. In addition, the book was adapted for film, television, and theatre. The Disney film is the best-known adaptation, though it is significantly different from the book, which is darker and portrays Pinocchio as more selfish and aggressive. However, the book has some humorous slapstick that is absent from the Disney version.

It's often the case that such dark, strange tales came about because their writers had tough lives too, and that’s definitely the case with Pinocchio’s writer, Carlo Collodi. He was born in Florence in 1826, in a long residential street narrow enough to block out most sunlight. He was the first of ten children – a situation so burdensome on his parents that Carlo was sent away to live in a village with his mother’s family for much of his childhood. Meanwhile, Collodi’s family suffered a series of tragedies. Six of his nine siblings died before reaching adulthood. Some passed away as babies, while others lived long enough to become established parts of the family only to die later into childhood.

The lasting pain the author experienced likely informed the bleaker parts of his story. Two of the themes that run through the original story are hunger and illness, with Pinocchio repeatedly experiencing starvation, as well as the characters around him wanting to try and eat him out of their own starvation. The same is also true of illness, which follows Pinocchio and at one point nearly kills him.

Grief for his lost siblings potentially plays a part in the story too. In one of the most haunting moments in the book, Pinocchio visits an empty house, once home to a family who have all since died. A little girl with ‘a face as white as a wax image’ comes to the window, and Pinocchio asks what she’s doing there. Without moving her lips, the girl says ‘I am dead too’. 

Collodi never married, but he did have a child with a married woman. The law prevented him from acknowledging this, leading many critics to wonder if Pinocchio represents the child the author never knew. Pinocchio’s last words before he was hanged were: ‘Oh dear father!…if you only you were here!’ – and knowing he had a child he never knew makes this line even more devastating. 

Despite its darkness, The Adventures of Pinocchio has always been popular in Italy – but it was Disney’s 1940 animated film that brought the character to the wider world. But, as Disney does, while it is still one of Disney’s darker films, it tames a lot of the darkness and violence and themes of hunger and illness, and instead focuses more on the magical aspects, turning Pinocchio into more of a generic child hero on a series of adventures.

Subsequent adaptations have similarly shied away from embracing the darkness of Collodi’s tale. They’ve ranged from a fully comedic Italian version in 2002, which received horrendous reviews, to 1971’s The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio, which had the tagline ‘It’s not the nose that grows!’.

Last year also gave us not one but two new versions of the tale, with Disney releasing a live-action remake of its animation, featuring Tom Hanks as Geppetto, with a rather dodgy Italian accent. It was not well-received, with 28% critic score and 27% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a tremendous 1.8 star average on Letterboxd from 19k reviews.

There was then an adaptation by Guillermo del Toro, famous for his fairytale horror and gothic storytelling. In stark contrast to the unnecessary Disney remake, del Toro’s stop motion story has a 96% critic score and 90% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and 4 star average on Letterboxd from 177k reviews. Del Toro moved the tale to 1930s fascist Italy, introduced a traumatic First World War backstory, and added a handful of freaky-looking creatures. For maybe the first time, this version is potentially just as scary as the original tale.

The vividness of the original story designed to scare kids appealed to del Toro, who said in an interview with the Metro: “In order to understand the world, our stories need to encompass the world. The world is scary.” He added, “As a child, my monsters were very specific. There was a faun that lived behind the armoire. And there were a bunch of green fingers that came out of the rug.” (I would love to have a whole conversation with del Toro. He would definitely be on my list of dream dinner guests.)

So there’s a rundown of the origins of Pinocchio, and how, much like the rest of the Dark Disney episodes we’ve done, the original story is a hell of a lot darker than the Disneyfied retelling.