7/28/2023 0 Comments Pinocchio story poemAnd he and his creator are shown living together happily in a town of half-timbered houses with steeply pitched roofs.īut then the film was crafted as the shadow of Italian Fascism, allied to German Nazism, was creeping across Europe. Pinocchio is given an Alpine hat with a feather stuck in the ribbon around the brim. Geppetto is transformed from a dirt-poor Tuscan carpenter into a maker of cuckoo clocks and other sophisticated timepieces. Pinocchio the movie is set in some ill-defined, mountainous European land. Some of the characters have names ending in “o.” But that is about as Italian as it gets. The most drastic change that Hollywood made was to thoroughly de-Italianize the story. Mendacity was in no way central to Collodi’s original work. What is more, the puppet tells at least three, and arguably four, other lies in the second part of the story without anything untoward happening to his nose. Even in the second run of installments, however, the puppet’s nose grows on only two occasions in response to his lying. Such, however, was the clamor from readers for the tale to be continued that its author resumed Storia di un burattino in the same newspaper four months later and sustained it through an additional 19 installments before definitively ending his story in January 1883, when the entire tale was repackaged as a book, Le avventure di Pinocchio, Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio, the Story of a Puppet). So, had the story ended when its author intended, the link would never have been made. When he did lie, his nose did not extend by even a millimeter. But-as we point out in the endnotes-not when he lied. Collodi continued to chronicle Pinocchio’s misadventures until he brought them to a shockingly grisly end in October, when the puppet was left hanging from a tree, apparently dead. Both the periodical and the series enjoyed instant popularity. The first installment was published in the launch issue of the Giornale per i Bambini, or Newspaper for Children, on July 7, 1881. The fable began as a serial, Storia di un burattino (The Story of a Puppet). Yet it is hard to read Collodi’s original story as a cautionary tale about the evils and consequences of lying. The emoji for a lie is a face with an absurdly long nose, and when the Washington Post’s fact-checkers scrutinize politicians’ assertions, they rate them on a scale from no Pinocchios to four. The result was to forge a link between Pinocchio and lying that has since become indissoluble. Disney, with a sharp eye for a visually arresting novelty, honed in on the puppet’s extending nose, making it central to his movie in a way that it is not in the book. And on a couple of occasions the author punishes him for his lies by making his nose grow. The Adventures has since gone on to be one of the world’s two most translated works of fiction it has been reincarnated in TV series, plays, video games and other movies the puppet’s name has been given to an asteroid and used to denote a philosophical conundrum―all largely because of the global fame conferred on him by Hollywood.Ĭollodi’s Pinocchio is also intermittently mendacious. But it was Disney’s motion picture that transformed Collodi’s puppet into a universally recognizable figure. It was published in an English translation in 1891, just eight years after it appeared in Italian, and soon became popular in the English-speaking world and beyond. The Adventures was not unknown outside Italy before Disney’s animators got to work on it. Seldom has a work of literature been so overshadowed by its celluloid adaptation. Many English speakers, by contrast, are more likely to have had their perceptions of the story colored by Walt Disney’s 1940 cartoon movie version, Pinocchio. Italian scholars have written extensive treatises on the layers of cultural, social, political and even religious significance to be found in it. In Italy, critics regard it as a masterpiece: one of the greatest works in the literary canon a book that has played a significant role in the development of the Italian language one rich in subtle allusions and artful contrivances, comparable to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Gulliver’s Travels. The gap between the way Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio is perceived in the land of its origin and the view taken of it by speakers of English is vast.
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