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Pinocchio
Directed by	Ben Sharpsteen Hamilton Luske Norman Ferguson T. Hee Wilfred Jackson Jack Kinney Bill Roberts
Produced by	Walt Disney
Written by	Aurelius Battaglia William Cottrell Otto Englander Erdman Penner Joseph Sabo Ted Sears Webb Smith Based on the book by Carlo Collodi
Starring	Cliff Edwards Dickie Jones Christian Rub Mel Blanc Walter Catlett Charles Judels Evelyn Venable Frankie Darro
Distributed by	RKO Radio Pictures
Release date(s)	February 7, 1940
Running time	88 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$2,600,000 USD (est.)
IMDb profile

Pinocchio is the second animated feature in the Disney animated features canon. It was produced by Walt Disney and was originally released to theatres by RKO Radio Pictures on February 7, 1940. Based on the book Pinocchio: Tale of a Puppet by Carlo Collodi, it was made in response to the enormous success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The plot of the film involves a wooden puppet being brought to life by a blue fairy, who tells him he can become a real boy if he proves himself "brave, truthful, and unselfish". Thus begin the puppet's adventures to become a real boy, which involve many encounters with a host of unsavory characters.

The film was adapted by Aurelius Battaglia, William Cottrell, Otto Englander, Erdman Penner, Joseph Sabo, Ted Sears, and Webb Smith from Collodi's book. The production was supervised by Ben Sharpsteen and Hamilton Luske, and the film's sequences were directed by Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, and Bill Roberts.

Contents 1 Characters 2 History 2.1 Production 2.2 Release:Reactions & Criticisms 3 Re-releases: Theatrical & home video 4 United States theatrical release history 5 Worldwide release dates 5.1 Pinocchio home video release history 6 Crew 6.1 Animation direction 7 Songs 7.1 Songs in film 7.2 Songs written for film but not used 7.3 Notes 8 External links

• Jiminy Cricket, voiced by Cliff Edwards. Jiminy is a cricket who acts as Pinocchio's "conscience" and the partial narrator of the story.
• Pinocchio, voiced by Dickie Jones. Pinocchio is a wooden puppet made by Geppetto and turned into a living puppet by the Blue Fairy.
• Geppetto, voiced by Christian Rub. Geppetto is a toymaker who creates Pinocchio and wishes for him to become a real boy.
• Figaro and Cleo, voiced by Mel Blanc. Geppetto's black and white housecat and goldfish, respectively.
• J. Worthington "Honest John" Foulfellow, voiced by Walter Catlett. Honest John is a sly anthropomorphic fox who tricks Pinocchio twice in the film.
• Gideon is Honest John's dumb, mute, anthropomorphic feline accomplice. His lone hiccup in the film is supplied by Mel Blanc.
• Stromboli, voiced by Charles Judels. Stromboli is a large, sinister, bearded Italian puppet maker who forces Pinocchio to perform onstage in order to make money.
• The Blue Fairy, voiced by Evelyn Venable. She is the beautiful fairy who brings Pinocchio to life and turns him into a real boy at the end.
• The Coachman, voiced by Charles Judels. A corrupt coachman who owns and operates Pleasure Island.
• Lampwick, voiced by Frankie Darro. Lampwick is a naughty boy Pinocchio meets on his way to Pleasure Island. He turns into a donkey while the boys are hanging out.
• Monstro is the whale that swallows Geppetto, Figaro, and Cleo during their search for Pinocchio.

The plan for the original film was considerably different from what was released. Numerous characters and plot points, many of which came from the original novel, were used in early drafts. Producer Walt Disney was displeased with the work that was being done and called a halt to the project midway into production so that the concept could be rethought and the characters redesigned.

Originally, Pinocchio was to be depicted as a Charlie McCarthy-esque wise guy, equally as rambunctious and sarcastic as the puppet in the original novel. He looked exactly like a real wooden puppet with, among other things, a long pointed nose, a peaked cap, and bare wooden hands. But Walt found that no one could really sympathize with such a character and so the designers had to redesign the puppet as much as possible. Eventually, they revised the puppet to make him look more like a real boy, with, among other things, a child's Tyrolean hat, and regular, 5-fingered hands with Mickey Mouse-type gloves on them. The only parts of him that still looked more or less like a puppet were his arms and legs.

Additionally, it was at this stage that the character of the cricket was expanded. Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Cliff "Ukelele Ike" Edwards) became central to the story. Originally the cricket wasn't even in the film. Once added, he was depicted as an actual (that is, less anthropomorphized) cricket with toothed legs and waving anntenae. But again Walt wanted someone more likable, so Ward Kimball conjured up "a little man with no ears. That was the only thing about him that was like an insect."

Mel Blanc (most famous for voicing many of the characters in Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons), was hired to perform the voice of Gideon the Cat, who was Foulfellow the Fox's sidekick. However, it was eventually decided for Gideon to be mute (just like Dopey, whose whimsical, Harpo Marx-style persona made him one of Snow White's most comic and popular characters). All of Blanc's recorded dialogue in this film was subsequently deleted, save for a solitary hiccup, which was heard three times in the film.

The influential abstract animator Oskar Fischinger contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy's wand.^[1]

Film critic Leonard Maltin would later write that "with Pinocchio, Disney reached not only the height of his powers, but the apex of what many critics consider to be the realm of the animated cartoon."^[2]

Pinocchio was not commercially successful when first released, and Disney only recouped about half of its $2.3 million budget, which was due in part to poor timing, with the cut-off of European markets due to World War II. By the time the film was released, the mood of Americans had also darkened, also due to the war. People just weren't as keen on seeing fantasy stories as they were in the days of Snow White.

But there were other reasons why Pinocchio didn't quite pan out on initial release. One thing that Snow White had that Pinocchio didn't was romance. There wasn't anything in the way of "falling-in-love-at-first-sight" in Pinocchio, as there had been in Snow White, which apparently was what people had come to expect of in Disney. To add insult to injury, Paolo Lorenzini, nephew of the original story's author, had beseeched the Italian Ministry of Popular Culture to charge Walt for slander in portraying Pinocchio "so he easily could be mistaken for an American," when it was perfectly obvious that the little puppet was in fact Italian. Nothing had apparently come of the protest.

Nevertheless, there were positive reactions to the movie as well. Archer Winsten, who had criticized Snow White, wrote: "The faults that were in Snow White no longer exist. In writing of Pinocchio, you are limited only by your own power of expressing enthusiasm." Also, despite the poor timing of the release, the film did do well both critically and at the box office in the United States. Jiminy Cricket's song, "When You Wish Upon a Star," became a major hit and is still identified with the film, and later as a fanfare for The Walt Disney Company itself. Pinocchio also won the Academy Award for Best Song and the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. In 1994, Pinocchio was added to the United States National Film Registry as being deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." In 2005, Time.com named it one of the 100 best movies of the last 80 years. Many film historians consider this to be the film that most closely approaches technical perfection of all the Disney animated features. Link Pinocchio earned $84,254,167 at the box office.[2]

With the re-release of Snow White in 1944 came the tradition of re-releasing Disney films every seven to ten years. Pinocchio has been theatrically re-released in 1945, 1954, 1962, 1971, 1978, 1984, and 1992. The 1992 re-issue was digitally restored by cleaning and removing scratches from the original negatives one frame at a time, eliminating age-old soundtrack distortions, and revitalizing the color. The film also received four video releases, being a hot-seller in 1985, a re-master in 1986, 1993, (all three of those releases were released as Walt Disney Classics videos) and 1999 as a 60th Anniversary edition. Although not part of the video series, one version of the 1999 VHS seemed to feature the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection logo, which might have been a video editing error, due to the fact that the cover does not feature the print logo and that the last official title in the series was The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (which was released May 25, 1999), when Pinocchio came out October 29, 1999. A reason might be that the film was originally going to be released in the Masterpiece Collection series, but Disney had a change of plans and the series was discontinued. It also had a Disney DVD "Limited Issue" release that year before it was added to the Gold Classic Collection in 2000. As of late, it is scheduled to be released to the Platinum Edition DVD line in 2009^{[citation needed]} and if this is true, this will be one of the few Disney classics that has not seen an updated DVD release in nine years.

February 7, 1940 (original release)

• February 9, 1940
• October 17, 1945
• February 18, 1954
• January 18, 1962
• July 7, 1971
• December 16, 1978
• December 21, 1984
• June 26, 1992

Country	Date
Brazil	February 26, 1940
Argentina	March 13, 1940
U.K.	May 21, 1940
Australia	October 24, 1940
Sweden	February 3, 1941
Canada	October 10, 1941
Eritrea	December 3, 1941
Finland	January 31, 1943
Spain	February 7, 1944
France	May 22, 1946
Belgium, Netherlands	June 13, 1946
Norway	September 5, 1946
Hong Kong	December 19, 1946
Italy	November 5, 1947
Poland	February 7, 1949
Denmark	May 25, 1950
West Germany	March 23, 1951
Austria	April 1, 1952
Japan	May 15, 1952
Philippines	October 7, 1952
Lebanon	March 25, 1967
Saudi Arabia	March 13, 1971
Kuwait	October 6, 1985

• July 16, 1985 (VHS and Beta, Classics edition)
• October 14, 1986 (VHS and Beta, remastered Classics edition)
• March 26, 1993 (VHS and Laserdisc, restored Classics edition)
• April 16, 1995 (VHS, Spanish-dubbed Clásicos edition)
• October 26, 1999 (60th Anniversary Edition, as well as a Limited Issue DVD)

• Fred Moore (Lampwick)
• Frank Thomas (Pinocchio on strings and at the puppet show)
• Milt Kahl (Pinocchio)
• Bill Tytla (Stromboli)
• Ward Kimball (Jiminy Cricket)
• Art Babbitt (Geppetto)
• Wolfgang Reitherman (Monstro)
• Eric Larson (Coachman)

Main article: Pinocchio (soundtrack)

The songs in Pinocchio were composed by Leigh Harline, Ned Washington and Frank Churchill. Paul J. Smith composed the incidental music score.

• "When You Wish upon a Star" - Jiminy Cricket; Chorus
• "Little Wooden Head" - Geppetto
• "Give a Little Whistle" - Jiminy Cricket; Pinocchio
• "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (An Actor's Life for Me)" - J. Worthington Foulfellow
• "I've Got No Strings" - Pinocchio
• "Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee (reprise)" - J. Worthington Foulfellow
• "When You Wish upon a Star (reprise)" - Jiminy Cricket; Chorus

• "I'm a Happy-Go-Lucky Fellow" - Jiminy Cricket (this song eventually showed up in Fun and Fancy Free)
• "As I Was Saying To the Duchess" - J. Worthington Foulfellow (this line is spoken briefly by Foulfellow in the film, however)
• "Three Cheers For Anything" - Lampwick; Pinocchio; Alexander; Other Boys
• "Monstro the Whale" - Chorus

1. ^ Moritz, William. Fischinger at Disney - or Oskar in the Mousetrap. Millimeter. 5. 2 (1977): 25-28, 65-67. [1]
2. ^ Maltin, Leonard (1973). Pinocchio. In Leonard Maltin (Ed.), The Disney Book, pp. 37. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc.

• Official Site
• Pinocchio at the Internet Movie Database

v • d • e Disney theatrical animated features
Official canon	Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) • Pinocchio (1940) • Fantasia (1940) • Dumbo (1941) • Bambi (1942) • Saludos Amigos (1942) • The Three Caballeros (1944) • Make Mine Music (1946) • Fun and Fancy Free (1947) • Melody Time (1948) • The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949) • Cinderella (1950) • Alice in Wonderland (1951) • Peter Pan (1953) • Lady and the Tramp (1955) • Sleeping Beauty (1959) • One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) • The Sword in the Stone (1963) • The Jungle Book (1967) • The Aristocats (1970) • Robin Hood (1973) • The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977) • The Rescuers (1977) • The Fox and the Hound (1981) • The Black Cauldron (1985) • The Great Mouse Detective (1986) • Oliver & Company (1988) • The Little Mermaid (1989) • The Rescuers Down Under (1990) • Beauty and the Beast (1991) • Aladdin (1992) • The Lion King (1994) • Pocahontas (1995) • The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) • Hercules (1997) • Mulan (1998) • Tarzan (1999) • Fantasia 2000 (1999) • The Emperor's New Groove (2000) • Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) • Lilo & Stitch (2002) • Treasure Planet (2002) • Brother Bear (2003) • Home on the Range (2004) • Chicken Little (2005) • Meet the Robinsons (2007) • Bolt (2008) • The Princess and the Frog (2009) • Rapunzel (2010)
Live-action films with animation	The Reluctant Dragon (1941) • Victory Through Air Power (1943) • Song of the South (1946) • So Dear to My Heart (1949) • Mary Poppins (1964) • Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) • Pete's Dragon (1977) • Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) • Enchanted (2007)
DisneyToon features	DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp (1990) • A Goofy Movie (1995) • Doug's 1st Movie (1999) • The Tigger Movie (2000) • Recess: School's Out (2001) • Return to Never Land (2002) • The Jungle Book 2 (2003) • Piglet's Big Movie (2003) • Teacher's Pet (2004) • Pooh's Heffalump Movie (2005)
Other	The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) • James and the Giant Peach (1996) • Dinosaur (2000) • A Christmas Carol (2009)
See also	Pixar • Walt Disney Animation Studios