What comes to your mind when you think of Pinocchio? A wooden puppet. A long nose. The will to be a living boy. The reason why I bring this issue to the agenda today is that the same story continues to be told, with changes every time, even though it has been told many times. As if almost 60 Pinocchio movies were not enough till now, 3 more movies were released in 2022 alone. One is a stop-motion animation, the second one is a 3D animation, and the last one is a version shot with live actors. Since the director of this last one, in which the master Geppetto was played by Tom Hanks, is a master director, Robert Zemeckis, who shot films such as Forrest Gump and the Back to the Future series in his time, I inevitably started to watch it, thinking that this is probably the best. Oh But how wrong I was. Dear Zemeckis, I want to remember you with the movie Contact. Would you, fall into these situations?...
So Don't waste your time because I think Guillermo del Toro's "Pinocchio" is the best among these 3 versions of Pinocchio that have been released recently... The best and also the darkest one. But wait, there's yet a darker version than that. 1940's original Pinocchio animation by Walt Disney, by the person who introduced the Pinocchio tale to the world. Yes, you heard that right, this is an exception in those happy, peaceful, powdered fairy tales of the Disney world. The darkest cartoon is Pinocchio. Not just because of the scary themes it contains. 76 minutes of the 88-minute animation takes place either at night or underwater. In other words, it is literally a cartoon set in dark environments. And my favorite. When I watched it in the cinema as a child, I was very scared and I couldn't get over it for days. You know, the feeling, to be afraid of something but still loving it regardless… Combined with the magic of animation reflected on the cinema screen, what was told in that fairy tale awakened some things in me that I find it difficult to describe even now. It kind of brought something to life in my mind. Bringing things to life and animation. They mean the same anyway. To bring something to life from something inanimate. Well, isn't that the essence of the Pinocchio tale? The desire of a lifeless puppet to come to life. And that brings us to the darkest version of the story. Yes, it gets even darker. The tale itself. You can find all kinds of violence in the book The Adventures of Pinocchio, written by Carlo Collodi in the 1800s. Our poor wooden puppet's feet are burned, hanged, sent to prison, falls into an animal trap, turned into a donkey, thrown into the sea to drown, and swallowed by a sea creature there. I'll explain why I categorized this creature as a sea creature a little later. In the third part of the book, Pinocchio gets bored with the famous talking cricket’s warnings and crushes it with a hammer. And then he doesn't seem to have much remorse. The cricket returns later in the book under other disguises though, Cheating, death, crime, cruelty, poverty, hunger, injustice, whatever you may want, is in the original of this tale. In other words, it reflects the true spirit of the period in which it was written. In fact, most of the children's fairy tales of that period are dark. Collodi the Author, this is his pseudonym by the way, certainly has a general moral purpose in telling his story, but the original work compares us to the terrifying mystery and unexpected wit of a dream emanating from the subconscious. Perhaps this is because of its dream-like qualities, it is constantly referred to in different ways. It's like a dream interpretation... It adapts to the format, environment, and era in which it is adapted. Despite all these different versions, the tale of Pinocchio still lives on today. So what attracts us in this fairy tale that was born as a book in the 1800s, was introduced to the whole world with the first animation made in the 1900s, and finally appeared on the stage in a contemporary outfit as stop-motion in the 2000s?
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