743. Pinocchio (1940)

Starring: Dickie Jones, Christian Rub, Mel Blanc

Director: T. Hee

Running Time: 88 mins

Pinocchio is an American film about a puppet brought to life who must prove his worth with help from a cricket as his conscience in order to fulfil his dream of becoming a real boy.

Well, it’s obvious that you can’t fault the animation in this, and in fact all, classic Disney films. It’s also a delightful fable, with a simple story about wishing and dreams coming true, and has some absolutely classic lines and scenes. However, I don’t think this stands among the true Disney greats because of the much weaker soundtrack, of which I still only find one song really good, and the story isn’t that exciting or interesting, and seems just a little bit random in places.

Starting with the story, I don’t know how close this film is to the original Italian story, but I’m sure some sequences were really unnecessary and annoying. I’m mainly thinking of the scenes when Honest John is trying to lead Pinocchio astray to becoming an actor. Of course, they’re important scenes, but they go on for way too long, the song ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee’ could have been so much shorter, and as such, they are pretty boring to watch.

However, the one good thing about the story is that it is a very simple fable all about the moral benefits of being good and working hard, and that side to the story is lovely, being interesting for both kids and adults.

Now, I think that this is one of the Disney films that continues to work better for the children’s audience. Sure, everyone who’s seen it has got a soft spot for it, but in comparison to some of the proper classics, i.e. Snow White, Cinderella, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book etc., it doesn’t have that brilliant combination of a great story, spectacular animation, and a decent soundtrack.

That was one of the main disappointments about this film for me, the songs. ‘When You Wish Upon A Star’ is a beautiful classic and rightly so, but the rest of the songs were just boring, repetitive, and bared little relation to the actual story, much like a lot of the ones in Dumbo.

Overall, this gets a 7.3, because despite having a nice, simple fable, it’s just not as strong a film as many of the other Disney classics, and is definitely not as consistently engaging and exciting to watch either.