A WHALE OF A CLIMAX!

All these sounds, special effects and the animation, itself, coalesce into a sequence of pulse-pounding excitement! Beginning rather comically as smoke furls out the floating leviathan’s spout hole, it quickly escalates into overwhelmingly desperate terror. Smoke billows out the whale’s mouth and he starts gasping. Pinocchio and Geppetto, wading forward on the monster’s tongue, push their little makeshift raft toward the gaping jaws ahead, striving doggedly against the inhaled current and wind. Cleo and Figaro are onboard. Jiminy, still floating inside a bottle, gets sucked into the behemoth as he had wanted, but just as now the others are making their exit. Monstro’s lips-flapping sneeze blasts all of them skimming out across the ocean’s surface. However as everybody knows, sneezes come in pairs, so now the whale starts huffing once more, sucking water, smoke, seagulls and unfortunately Pinocchio, Geppetto and their raft back again into his gullet. The second sneeze catapults them even farther away, but as Geppetto predicted, Monstro is now seized with crazed fury.

Actually rearing up first, the whale then launches after them, spewing gigantic effusions of seawater. Pinocchio and Geppetto clamber back onto their raft and start rowing frantically, but their efforts are no match for the might and craftiness of the monster. He submerges. “Where’d he go?” shouts Pinocchio. The whale breaches from beneath them, sending all tumbling chaotically down the length of his long spine. They scramble back again onto their raft as the whale navigates a titanic turnaround in order to make another lunging attack, fomenting a huge wave in front of him. The raft slides down the backside of this tsunami, Pinocchio and Geppetto paddling with all their might away from it. But Monstro explodes through the peak of the wave, diving down directly onto them. “Let’s row back!” shouts Pinocchio, and their reverse effort succeeds in avoiding the crush of the monster’s head. His tail, however, high in the air behind him, comes crashing down toward the raft. In the nick of time, Pinocchio and Geppetto abandon ship as the colossal tail splinters it into a wreck of driftwood.

Exhausted, gasping, Geppetto clings to a board and admonishes his son to save himself.

Pinocchio will have none of it, grabs his father’s collar and starts swimming toward a distant rocky shoreline. Monstro, meantime, comes about once more and speeds toward them to deliver his coup de grâce. Pinocchio spies a gap between the rocks. If only he can drag his father through it to safety! But the massive wave ahead of them rises up and blocks the opening just as Monstro lunges toward them. The leviathan’s entire head fills the screen, jaws widening, teeth bared, hateful eyes focused on us, the viewers – the most alarming shot in the entire movie!

Since the whale has propelled himself out of the ocean, its waters recede just enough for Pinocchio to breach the gap. The behemoth crashes into the rocky abutment, his front end crumpling like an accordion bellows and plunging the wave through the opening.

Disney lets us down easy after the intense violence of this episode. On the other side of that abutment the ocean spurts through with a burst of foam and splashing, tumbling over rocks, then gently receding. In its wake, it leaves Geppetto, alive but unconscious lying face-up in the surf. Another foamy wave sloshes mildly over the shore carrying Figaro on a piece of driftwood and Cleo still safe in her bowl. Next we see Jiminy, having emerged from his bottle, pop up over a rock searching for Pinocchio. He gasps and the camera trucks rapidly into a shot of the puppet lying face-down in a tidal pool, dead. In the upper right of the background is an accidental crisscross of driftwood. As no detail in this film was not ruthlessly debated, I feel certain this scenic element purposefully cross-references Pinocchio’s self-sacrifice to the familiar Christian crucifixion. And pointedly, a resurrection is soon to follow…

Solemn and mournful, the next scene shows grieving Geppetto kneeling at his bedside, head buried in his folded arms, weeping over his little woodenhead, who lies on the coverlet face-up, motionless. Figaro and Cleo and Jiminy are grief-stricken as well. After the usual careful deliberation, Disney decided the Blue Fairy need not reappear. Instead we hear only her disembodied mellifluous voice quietly repeating the conditions she specified for real boyhood – “brave, truthful and unselfish” – and as the puppet has now met all these requirements, she transforms him, co-incidentally of course bringing him back from death. After the customary burst of effulgence subsides, Pinocchio sits up, rubbing his eyes. “Whacha cryin’ for?” he asks his father, who responds “Because you are dead, Pinocchio. Now lie down…”

Here we get that very same “laughter through tears” that during Steel Magnolias (1989) Dolly Parton declares is her favorite emotion. Dead? “No, no I’m not,” answers Pinocchio, “And…” Now he looks at and feels his arm and realizes he is flesh and blood, the animation of his face perfectly expressing his baffled amazement. “I’m a real boy!” Geppetto looks up and with palpable joy scoops up his now human son into his arms to embrace him. Figaro jumps into Cleo’s fishbowl and gives her a big wet kiss.

The finished film received an early January 1940 preview about one month before its official premiere.

After Walt saw Pinocchio’s transformation to a real boy on the big screen, the “real” Pinocchio was redesigned, and a block of his scenes freshly reanimated by Milt Kahl, before the official opening.[1] Basically this “redesign” was an adjustment of the character’s proportions: his hands and eyes, head and shoes were reduced in size to make them more resemble a realistic child’s. In the original animation Frank Thomas had left them puppet-sized merely eliminating the wooden joints and gloves and supplying five-fingered hands. A few quick shots of his animation were retained, the rest redrawn.

A joyous celebration ensues, Geppetto playing his concertina and dancing about the workshop with his little son, music boxes blaring, Figaro dancing a minuet with Cleo. “This is practically where I came in,” remarks Jiminy as he ducks outside through a window to thank “m’lady” the Blue Fairy. Addressing that far-off twinkling star, the cricket affirms her decision, agreeing that Pinocchio deserved his gift of humanity. Then lo and behold! with another effusion of sparkling magic a golden badge appears on his lapel. It reads “Official Conscience”. The cricket proudly adjusts his badge so that it catches the starlight and reflects it back to its source in the distant sky. With a final choral iteration of its opening lyrics, the film comes full circle and ends.

Kaufman asserts,

“This is not just animation: it’s film-making. That’s what impresses me about this film in particular. They not only studied movement and attitude and personality at the studio but they obviously watched movies and they understood camera angles and cutting and stage direction. It’s all part of their ‘tookit’.”[2]

---

[1] Kaufman, J.B.: op. cit., p. 261.

[2] Kaufman, J.B.: from the audio commentary on the 2010 70th Anniversary Blu-ray release of Pinocchio.