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...