Pinocchio and Me

 It all started with Pinocchio.  Twice.  More often if you stretch the definition of "all started."

At 4 or 5 years old, as the '80s gave way to the '90s, I thought I knew what cartoons were: the cheap and tacky looking things that the other kids in the neighbourhood watched in the afternoons, and I had no interest in them.  That was until I saw Pinocchio (1940), which we videotaped from the TV, and I discovered how great a cartoon could be.

A few years later - I must have been 10 - and I was a major fan of cartoons from the Golden Age of Animation (roughly, 1930s-1950s), but I hadn't seen Pinocchio in years (and a year is a long time when you've only lived for ten of them).  I got a yearning to see it again, but the TV-recorded video had long since worn out.  So it was at the top of my Christmas list, and when I got a new video copy on Christmas Day, the family sat down together in the evening to watch it.

And... I was terrified.

When you're a little bit older, you have a better grasp of the horrors the characters in the film face: being locked in a cage, being turned into a donkey (unrecognisable, and unable to speak) and sold into slavery, and starving to death inside a whale, from which "nothing goes out".  Pinocchio, as Jiminy states in his introduction, is the story of a wish coming true, but that night as I lay in bed I felt I should have been careful what I wished for.  My love of classic cartoons remained, but the Pinocchio video was off-limits.

Another few years later - I was 16 - and my interest in classic cartoons had waned, but when I watched the Rankin-Bass animated versions of The Hobbit and Return of the King their pseudo-European wood-carved sinister charm made me think of the atmosphere of the earliest Disney films.  I remembered how disturbed I had been the last time I saw Pinocchio (and Snow White, for that matter) so I proceeded with caution.  I also probably felt that for a Lord of the Rings devotee to turn to the Disney films that Tolkien hated so much was a bit of a betrayal.

So, I didn't get my videos out again, but I did look the films up on as many internet sites as I could find.  Because of my own personal history with the film, it was probably Pinocchio which piqued my interest the most.  I also hauled out my copy of Christopher Finch's book "The Art of Walt Disney" and read what it had to say.

As I read the chapter on Pinocchio, I learned a few things.  The character of Stromboli, it said, was "animated by Bill Tytla", while Geppetto was "largely handled by Art Babbitt" and Lampwick was "Fred Moore's assignment".  I remembered that I knew about the different *directors* at the Warner Bros. studio - I knew the differences between a Bob Clampett cartoon, a Chuck Jones cartoon and a Friz Freleng cartoon - but I had never really thought about what the individual *animators'* contributions were.  The thought that I could watch a piece of character animation and recognise it as the work of an individual artist was exciting to me.

So it was that Pinocchio not only made me a cartoon fan, but also inspired me to develop a greater understanding of animation.

From a personal point of view, it was perfect that, after he had posted several animator drafts (the studio documents that record which animator was responsible for which scene in a cartoon) from Disney short cartoons, Hans Perk chose Pinocchio as the first *feature* for which he would post the entire draft on his blog.  By this time I was 21, and a University student.

Pinocchio was the film that made me like cartoons, the film that made me interested in learning about the work of individual animators, and now the first feature where I knew, with the information at my fingertips, which animator had drawn which character and where.  It was the film that kept coming back to me, through every stage of growing up.