DVD: Walt Disney's Pinocchio

Re-mastered for the new Blu-Ray technology,Walt Disney’s 1940 production of Pinocchio looms over the current digital animation. Although the visual style is more related to two-dimensional storybook illustration, the color and illusion of depth have an extraordinary emotional impact.The term “Old Master” applies— not for nostalgic reasons but because this version of the Carlo Collodi perennial fable hits the truest notes of imagination and feeling. It doesn’t need the spurious digital “realism.”

Pinocchio’s classic story of a puppet who wants to become a real boy is also a parable of faith, prayerfulness and moral example—as revealed when Spielberg extrapolated this plot into the futurist, sci-fi philosophizing of A.I. (It was a philological reinterpretation similar to the way Hook took off from Peter Pan.) Disney’s mid-century lushness seems as appropriate to represent those themes as Renaissance painting does to represent Christian concepts. Now seen in brighter colors than ever before, Pinocchio’s contrast even to a visually splendid contemporary animation like The Iron Giant,The Incredibles and Ratatouille also seems to contrast soulfulness against hollowness.

Consider the “I’ve Got No Strings” number. As the enchanted, wooden-hinged Pinocchio dances on stage with other puppets and gets entangled in their inescapable strings, the difference between Pinocchio and the marionettes is as clearly evident on your TV monitor as it ever was on the big screen.The difference is spatial, material, spiritual—like David in A.I. More evidence that Wall-E’s substitution of human emotion with mechanical whatzit stinks, not to mention evidence of what we’ve lost in capitulation to it. Disney’s Pinocchio may not be as great as Dumbo—the masterpiece—but it lives.