What Walt Taught Me: Pinocchio

Last updated on: July 31, 2015 at 11:55 am by John Mark N. Reynolds

What Walt Taught Me: Pinocchio 2015-07-31T11:55:50-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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There was once a little boy in West Virginia who received a puppet. He played with it and the toys of his time lasted and lasted. They were built for love and so the little boy grew up, became a dad, kept his puppet, until his son found the little wooden head in his dad’s sock drawer.

That has how I first found Pinocchio and I loved him almost to death. Puppets were playthings and I used them to create shows . . .especially an alligator hand puppet, but Pinocchio was first. I did not get to see the movie until much later, but to me the Disney Pinocchio was Pinocchio. Some like the classic Italian book better and it has its place, but nothing could replace Dad’s little wooden headed puppet in my imagination.

Pinocchio is better made than Snow White, but not as revolutionary as Snow White. There is a lesson there: nothing can ever replace first. The film demigods at the old Disney studio had mastered the short, added sound, color, and finally told a long story in Snow White. They had better tools by the time film number two was made and though a world in the maw of World War II did not have as much time to watch this movie, Pinocchio was a nearly perfect animated tale. Given the tools of the time, I do not think a better film of this sort could be made.

What did Walt teach me?

This may be the most moralistic movie ever made: let your conscience be your guide. Nowadays the “bad boy” is the good boy, but Pinocchio is too realistic for that sort of madness. Disney’s film is more realistic than most of today’s Internet because it knows the truth: do bad and bad will happen to you. This is true in this life and the life to come.

Don’t make a jackass of yourself or you will become what you do. Pinocchio keeps making wrong decisions: he skips school, runs off to Pleasure Island, smokes, drinks, tells lies, and makes an ass of himself. His behavior contains its own punishment, but his family (Geppetto, Figaro, and Cleo) suffer because of him. Sad enough if the wages of sin were our own death, but horrid that we harm our beloved family.

Pinocchio makes morality look good.

Finally, Walt’s brilliant animators and musicians convinced me that dreamers are important if they are also doers. Walt was a dreamer who acted practically to make his dreams come true. Pinocchio is his summary of his life’s lesson: do right and good things will (often) come to you. If he had stopped there, the lesson would have been like an Elsie Dinsmore novel: insufferable moralism with no scope for the imagination. Walt saw the stars and understood that morality was the window for the imagination to reach Heaven. An imagination without conscience ended up on Pleasure Island: a donkey in boy’s clothing even if a man in age. A conscience without imagination was earth bound. The moral man who wished on a star, like Geppetto, would see greater things.

As the world was at war, Hitler in Poland, England on the brink, Pinocchio was a great movie at the wrong time. Internationally, people could not see the film and if it seems dark to us today, in 1940 the movie must have seemed hopelessly optimistic to some: Disney sugar coating on an ugly world. And yet at the end of that decade, Disney was making films and the tyrants were gone . . . dreamers who were doers, Roosevelt and Churchill, made it so..

Walt wrote them a score and gave a generation the moral fiber to wish upon the proper star. There once was a boy who grew up to buy his children puppets and they made brilliant shows about Super Dog and his exploits. He knew that if he taught his kids good morals and allowed them to dream, no time was too dark, no request too extreme.

Thanks, Walt.

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