‘Pinocchio’ and wishing upon a 70-year-old star

Loosely based on a 19th-century children’s novel by Carlo Collodi, “Pinocchio” remains a technical summit of hand-drawn animation, executed with a grace and expressiveness of movement that even Disney’s artists were never quite able to recapture. On one level it is about the wonder of its own existence: the little wooden boy who comes to life is a metaphor for Disney’s process of creation, turning ink and paint into three-dimensional creatures that seem to breathe with a force of their own. Although Disney used voices that audiences of the time might have recognized, these were not the A-list stars routinely drafted today to lend their familiar personalities to animated characters. The most celebrated member of the cast was Cliff Edwards, a popular vocalist of the 1920s who had a hit with an early recording of “Singin’ in the Rain.” His soft Southern vowels help to shape Jiminy Cricket, but the voice does not define the character, which emerges instead through line, color and the distinctive tilt of his head. In adapting Collodi, Disney turned a social novel into a psychological one about, like so much of Disney’s work, the agony of growing up and the impossibility of resistance. The most nocturnal of animated films, “Pinocchio” begins with a vision of a clean, well-lighted place — Geppetto’s workshop — snugly barricaded against the cold uncertainties of the outside world. Over the course of the three episodes that constitute the main story, the palette turns chillier and the spaces expand to dizzying proportions, culminating with the near-black-and-white rendering of the undersea world of Monstro the Whale. READ THE REST HERE