Pinocchio
From Freepedia
- "Once upon a time, there was ... 'A king!' my little readers will say right away. No, children, you are wrong. Once upon a time there was a piece of wood...."
Pinocchio (Le Avventure di Pinocchio) is a children's tale about a mischievous, sentient, talking piece of firewood carved into a marionette by Geppetto, a poor Italian woodcarver. Written by Carlo Collodi and published in serial form between 1881 and 1883 and in book form in 1883 in Italy, it has come to be a classic; it has been filmed over twenty times. Notable film versions include:
- Walt Disney's full-length animated feature Pinocchio (1940).
- The Adventures of Pinocchio, (1972) a film by Luigi Comencini.
- "Geppetto", a TV-movie that aired on The Wonderful World of Disney in 2000 starring Drew Carey in the title role and what he did while Pinocchio was on his adventures.
- A less successful live-action film in 2002 directed by and starring Roberto Benigni.
- Pinocchio and Gepetto are major characters in the comic book Fables by Bill Willingham.
Collodi had not originally intended the work as purely a children's story: in the original version Pinocchio dies, hanged for his innumerable faults. In the later versions the story was changed to the famous ending with the marionette transforming into a child. Many reviewers conclude that Pinocchio, rather than a children's tale, is a critique of a familiar form, the novel of education, an allegory of contemporary society, a look at the contrast between respectability and free instinct in a very severe, formal time. Behind the optimistic pedagogical appearance, the romance is a sad irony, and sometimes a satire, on that formal pedagogy and, through this, against the nonsense of these social manners in general. In style the story was new and modern, opening the way to many writers of the following century. Its Italian language is peppered with Florence dialect features. Several of the book's concepts have become commonplace, particularly the proverbial long nose for liars.
Pinocchio had an immediate success, but in upper class families it was not initially regarded as suitable for "well-educated" children.
Aleksei Nikolaevich Tolstoi wrote a famous Russian adaptation of the book, entitled The Little Gold Key or the Adventures of Buratino Illustrated by Alexander Koshkin , Translated from the Russian by Kathleen Cook-Horujy, Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1990, 171 pages, ISBN 5050028434 (burattino is Italian for "puppet").
The Disney animated film Pinocchio (first released on February 7, 1940), although a free interpretation of the Collodi story, is considered a masterpiece of the art of animation and has been deemed "culturally significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
The name "Pinocchio" is from Toscany and means : "pine nut" or "kernel".
Steven Spielberg's film, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), based on a Stanley Kubrick project that was cut short by Kubrick's death, recasts the Pinocchio theme, in which an android with emotions longs to become a real boy.
See also
External links
- Free eBook of Adventures of Pinocchio at Project Gutenberg (translated from Italian by Carol Della Chiesa)
- "The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's heirs in contemporary fiction and film"
Categories: 1880 books | Children's books | Characters in written fiction | Florence | Italian novels | Dolls
