Pinocchio (1940)

Pinocchio is a 1940 animated musical fantasy adventure film, and the second entry on the official Walt Disney animated canon, after the success of Snow White. It was based on the children's book of the same name by Carlo Collodi. In April 2015, a live-action adaptation directed by Robert Zemeckis had officially entered development and began filming in March 2021, which will premiere exclusively on Disney+ in September 8, 2022 for the same date for Disney+ Day 2022.

Like the Fleischer Studios, Pinocchio was a groundbreaking achievement in the area of effects animation, giving realistic movement to vehicles, machinery and natural elements such as rain, lightning, smoke, shadows and water.

Plot
When the woodworker Geppetto (Christian Rub) sees a falling star, he wishes that the puppet he just finished, Pinocchio (Dickie Jones), could become a real boy. In the night, the Blue Fairy (Evelyn Venable) grants Geppetto's wish and asks Jiminy Cricket (Cliff Edwards) to serve as the wooden boy's conscience. But the naive and trusting Pinocchio falls into the clutches of the wicked Honest John (Walter Catlett), who leads him astray to the sinful Pleasure Island.

Why It Wishes Upon A Star

 * 1) Takes all the best elements of the fairy tale and turns them into a more focused storyline.
 * 2) The animation's every bit as good as you'd expect from Disney.
 * 3) *Like the Fleischer Studios, the effects animation was decent, giving realistic movement to vehicles, machinery and natural elements such as rain, lightning, smoke, shadows and water.
 * 4) Nearly all of the main characters are memorable in their own right. In particular, it has some of the best villains in any Disney animated film, namely Stromboli, despite his rather limited screen time.
 * 5) The humorous deuteragonist, Jiminy Cricket, stole the show.
 * 6) The darker tone makes it really stand out among the Disney canon. Considering how it is, it makes it really balancing dark and light tone.
 * 7) Despite being a wooden puppet come to life, Pinocchio is actually a very realistic character, being more willing to be naughty when influenced by others instead of being incorruptibly pure from the start to the end of the movie.
 * 8) Great songs, with "When You Wish Upon a Star" being a stand-out, produced in 1939, so much that it since then became the theme song for the Disney company nowadays. It even won a competitive Academy Award, with earing two for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song.
 * 9) Despite the generally darker tone compared to the rest of the Disney canon, there are still plenty of good jokes throughout.
 * 10) A very heartwarming ending, with Pinocchio sacrificing himself to save his "father" and Jiminy, and being rewarded by being brought back to life as a real boy.
 * 11) The voice acting is really great.
 * 12) Pinocchio is changed to be more likeable and very friendly in this adaptation than a cold, rude, ungrateful and inhuman brat in the book, where he outright killed Jiminy Cricket and is given multiple "last chances".

Bad Qualities

 * 1) A few scenes (eg. Stromboli locking Pinocchio in a birdcage, donkeys being sold by the Coachman to slave labor in salt mines and circuses and Lampwick's donkey transformation) may be little too intense for younger viewers of G-rated movie.
 * 2) It features kids smoking and drinking, which is pretty inappropriate for a family film nowadays. Though to be fair, people were still deciding what was suitable for children and what wasn't at the time, and the kids end up being turned into donkeys for bad behaviour after engage in violent brawls, drink unhealthy amounts of magical alcohol, gamble, go on rides, and generally abuse their privileges for Pleasure Island, thus giving the message that this is something they shouldn't be doing.
 * 3) One of the villains, the Coachman (except Stromboli, Monstro and Foulfellow/Gideon), didn’t receive any punishment or harsh consequences, though this can be a perfect example that realistically, life is unfair and bad people can get away with their actions sometimes. Likely, the video game adaptation features Pinocchio knocking him over the cliff.
 * 4) Stromboli was actually seen eating his food with a knife, which is very dangerous and painful since he could've cut the inside of his mouth, thus believing that he would've been killed at first. In fact, kids would probably get confused and try to mimic Stromboli and eventually harm themselves.
 * 5) Although still cute, adorable, and likable, Pinocchio himself can be rather naïve, though that is understandable since he's only a young child and he was practically (or literally) born yesterday in the events of the film.

Reception
Like several of Disney's other films in the early 1940s, Pinocchio was well-reviewed, but ended up as a box office bomb and an overall financial failure due to World War II preventing any wide release outside of North America.

Critical analysis of Pinocchio identifies it as a simple morality tale that teaches children of the benefits of hard work and middle-class values. Although it became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award – winning two for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song for "When You Wish Upon a Star" – it was initially a box office disaster. It eventually made a profit in its 1945 reissue, and is considered one of the greatest animated films ever made. The film and characters are still prevalent in popular culture, featuring at various Disney parks and in other forms of entertainment.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has the website's highest rating of 100%, meaning every single one of the 56 reviews of the reviews from contemporary, to modern re-appraisals, on the site are positive, with an average rating of 9.1/10. The general consensus of the film on the site is "Ambitious, adventurous, and sometimes frightening, Pinocchio arguably represents the pinnacle of Disney's collected works - it's beautifully crafted and emotionally resonant.". On Metacritic, Pinocchio has a weighted score of 99 out of 100 based on 17 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". It is currently the highest-rated animated film on the site, as well as the highest-rated Disney animated film.

In 1994, Pinocchio was added to the United States National Film Registry for being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". A live-action adaptation of the film is currently in development.

Trivia

 * The first Oswald short to ever be produced, Poor Papa, can be found on the Signature Edition Blu-Ray of this film.
 * Unlike Snow White, which was a short story that the writers could expand and experiment with, Pinocchio was based on a novel with a very fixed, although episodic, story. Therefore, the story went through drastic changes before reaching its final incarnation. In the original novel, Pinocchio is a cold, rude, ungrateful, inhuman brat that often repels sympathy and only learns his lessons the hard way. The writers decided to modernize the character and depict him similar to Edgar Bergen's dummy Charlie McCarthy, but equally as rambunctious as the puppet in the book. The story was still being developed in the early stages of animation.